Each morning I start my day reviewing the brands I monitor on a regular basis. I won’t tell you which brands I monitor but I will tell you that I use five tools to monitor them so that I can make the most of my day as a busy online marketer:
- Google Reader
- Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts
- Google News
- Twitter
- Heardable
Were you surprised that my list didn’t contain any of the popular social media monitoring tools such as Radian6, eCairn, Sysomos or Techrigy SM2? There is nothing wrong with utilizing any of these tools as long as you are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to use them. By doing so, you can probably automate 80% of your online brand research effort that is required when trying to monitor a brand.
Frankly, that’s what we have staff for — to be experts at utilizing these types of robust tools. But as a busy executive, I often don’t have the time not patience to learn yet another cool tool to help me do my job. Call me old school, by I am perfectly happy using a handful of simple, smart, user-friendly tools that give me the information that I need, when I need it (without much hassle). My five tools fit the bill quite nicely — and I marry my findings with those on my expert teams to compile a holistic view on brand performance.
Why do I monitor certain brands? It’s my job to measure, monitor and improve brand effectiveness because in the business world I live and breath in– winning is everything. Big companies don’t pay the money they do to come in second place. Management wants to achieve all of its goals. Employees want to advance their careers. Shareholders want to see a fair return on their investment.
Business is a full-contact sport. It’s about beating your competitors before they beat you.
When I am knee-deep in the data, what am I looking for? What jewels am I unearthing? What actionable takeaways to I gain from the work that I do? Glad you asked!
My Tools Help Me
- Understand what communities are buzzing about
- Identify key trends
- Perform competitive analysis
- Optimize brand performance
- Improve the customer experience
- Grow market share / Boost sales
Using The Tools In My E-Toolbox
Let me explain how I utilize each to start by day as a busy online marketer.
Google Reader: This is what I use to aggregate all my RSS feeds into one comprehensive list that I can scan in less than a minute to see if there are any articles or blog posts from those I trust that I should be aware of. When I find something I want to read, I mark it so I can read the post later in the day over lunch.
By scanning the headlines I collect in Google Reader, I get a feel for what’s being discussed on a deeper level in the blogosphere, and provides the ‘expert’ POV on what communities are buzzing about.
Social Mention Alerts / Google Alerts: I lump these two together because they essentially do the same thing, but I find neither one is strong enough on it’s own for me to forgo using the other. Basically, I use these tools to seek out and flag certain keywords on a daily basis and serve them up to me in a consolidated list I can quickly scan. Google is fairly comprehensive on its own, but I distrust using a single keyword monitoring service to sift through the entire deep web of data on a daily basis. I like SocialMention.com’s alerts because they tend to provide me with a wider variety of results.
To be honest, there is a lot of dreg one has to comb through to find the gold, but you would be surprised to learn that I find all kinds of quirky, useful and unexpected nuggets of data in these simple, automated data feeds. Set up your keywords one time, then check you email for daily results. Easy as pie.
Google News: To me, Google News is the one and only daily news aggregator I need to tap into. Sure, I occasionally monitor PRWeb and BusinessWire, or go to Alltop or TMZ (for entertainment), but for news (eg: press releases and breaking stories) Google News has replaced my daily newspaper and my online portals.
I search for certain brand keywords and can sort through countless stories that inform me about strategy, website redesigns, staff changes, and the like.
Twitter: For real-time breaking information, nothing beats Twitter. It really has become my social search engine of choice. Not because it functions so much as a search engine but as a pulse of what’s happening. I can easily see what’s trending hot right now and I can perform a little bit of competitive analysis by studying how savvy certain brands are by looking to see if they are on Twitter (many still are not, and when they are, you cannot find them because often times their brand name has been hyjacked by someone else). You can also watch how certain brands are participating on Twitter (so many pilot tests, so little authenticity — such as having one’s CEO actively tweeting).
Heardable: I’ve been a fan of Heardable.com since I was first invited to test their beta site in late 2009. It is quite simply one of the most underrated digital marketing gems out there (although this will be changing fast as their first press release came out today).
So what is the Heardable platform and how do I use it? Heardable allows anyone to type in a domain name and within seconds, get a comprehensive assessment of that brand’s online effectiveness in six critical areas. I have a free account with Heardable which allows me to scan multiple brands at the same time, store groups of scans that I may need to revisit daily, track how multiple brands perform against each other over time, and determine what specifically one brand is doing to score higher than another.
I love to ‘look under the hood’ at the top brands in the world that are profiled in The Heardable 100 list of companies. At a glance, you can see common threads of what leading brands are doing better than everyone else, such as:
- Who is optimizing their website for mobile browsers — and which browsers?
- What analytic tools are certain brands using?
- Which brands are excelling at SEO and which are not?
- Is brand x sociable and/or sharing data — living up to the spirit of the giving web, the foundation of which all of web 2.0 and now web 3.0 is based on?
Heardable is brilliant. And from what I hear from the company’s founders, their growth strategy is very exciting. Keep an eye on Heardable.
In summary, I perform my daily ritual not because I yearn to to better than I did the day before. It’s my job to help brands win by increasing sales and growing market share. This can only be done of you know what’s happening in your market, you’re being the best steward of your brand as possible, you’re learning though trial and error and testing, you’re listening to crowds and trying your best to please, and you are optimizing everything you do as often as possible — from landing pages to the language you use to talk about your brand to the way you engage your constituents.
Online brand optimization ain’t easy. But with the right (free) tools and a little hard work come great rewards.
Social media, SEO, marketing and writing
The platform examines over 40 unique on-site and off-site brand variables, including a website’s code, inbound links, usability, social brand presence, mobile readiness, and other unique characteristics. The highest possible Heardable Score that can be achieved is 1000. A score between 401-600 is average.
I think brand managers and C-level marketers are really going to like Heardable because it’s an easy way to measure how one brand is performing against a competitor, across multiple variables, plus providing drill-downs into exactly how and why one brand is doing better than the other. Kinda like opening the hood of your competitor’s brand and seeing their online strategy in action. Sweet!
