As recently posted, monitoring social media is very powerful — particularly when it comes to customer support. Let’s not forget that social a is more than just blogging — it encompasses everything about online communication, including message forums. From simple to complex, message forums are a much larger animal to monitor. Here’s a few recommendatins as well as thoughts on why you should be monitoring social media:

Referring links can sometimes be the crystal ball you’ve been looking for
Setup a daily report so you receive the top 25, 50, 100 (whatever you deem necessary) referring links to your website. We do this for SuperMotors so we can see which sites have generated traffic to SuperMotors.net in the past 24 hours and why. The fact that you get a lot of traffic from referring links is good to know, but you need to evaluate the reason for this traffic. This, by far, is one of the easiest methods at determining whether or not an “internet riot” is brewing regarding your company. I cannot count the number of times this has helped us discover a discussion occuring on another forum regarding a problem with our site.

No matter what, consumers will voice their concerns where it’s convenient for them.
Your customer support phone number and/or e-mail address may be clearly listed on your website, but your customers and consumers in general do not like to wait for answers. This is another reason social media is so powerful when it comes to recommendations and support issues regarding products. What’s more convenient: Calling a customer service center with a question and sitting on hold? E-mailing a customer service center and waiting for feedback? Or searching a website full of consumers who have already encountered the problem or question you have? I’ll search the web first every time before contacting customer service. It’s instantaneous and it’s convenient. Spending 5 minutes researching with Google is often times much more effective than spending 5 minutes navigating through touch-tone phone menus and speaking to a first-tier customer representative.

Find the most popular sites sending traffic to your site and monitor them on a daily basis
My morning routine consists of checking e-mail, reading RSS feeds, and hitting the top 5 discussion forums that drive the most traffic to SuperMotors on a consistent, daily basis. Register accounts on these sites and be available if discussions start up about a problem with your site or business. Use the search feature: search for company name, domain name, mispellings of your company name, abbreviations of your company name — anything to find topics of discussion on your business. This can be extremely effective and will save you from losing customers that otherwise would have gone to a competitive service. Most days, you won’t find anything, and it takes 5-10 minutes of your morning. Other days, you’ll spend quite a bit of time defusing touchy situations regarding poor performance of your service. Suck it up and be honest with your customers, they’ll appreciate it…and they’ll stick with you.

Search blogs, del.icio.us, digg, bloglines, technorati, etc.
Again, doing your due diligence will pay off. You need to know what people are saying about your business. Start with these resources (in no particular order):

• http://blogsearch.google.com/
• http://www.bloglines.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/
• http://www.digg.com/
• http://del.icio.us/

If that’s overwhelming, try monitoring RSS feeds of search results from the above URLs (each of them offers RSS feeds for search queries — except del.icio.us).

Professional social media monitoring & measurement services
I’ll be test-driving BuzzLogic over the next few months as they iron out the kinks in their beta (and will be reporting any interesting findings). You may be interested in a more comprehensive list found here.

Chalk up another well-educated company (PEER 1 Dedicated Hosting) doing their part in monitoring blogs for feedback on their products and service (this makes company #3 to contact me as a result of a blog post in the last few weeks). This morning, I received a call from a sales manager from Peer 1 in response to this post. Again, I must applaud the blogging medium for its power as well as companies who recognize the significance and impact of consumers and customers doing the blogging.

After assuring me that this was not the desired result for my initial experience with them, I also received a call from the rep who I have been working with as we pursue hosting for SuperMotors.net. Since clearing the air, I have received two customer references from PEER 1 (which is really all we’re waiting for to help validate their service — everything else looks great and we anticipate signing a managed hosting contract in the next 2-3 weeks).

I strongly recommend investigating companies that measure social media for your business. I’ll be giving BuzzLogic a shot in the coming months as they perfect their beta. My little blog has found its way to 3 vendors I do business with. Just imagine how many of your consumers and customers could be saying something about your company on their blogs. My whole perception of Omniture, Clickshift, and Peer 1 has drastically improved as a result — and it very easily could have lead me to another vendor without them reaching out to me.

After a recent post about Clickshift being acquired by WebTrends and voicing my concerns, and a previous experience with Omniture monitoring blog posts, I did get a call (voicemail) and e-mail follow-up from Clickshift. Let me go on a slight tangent by saying how much I love how powerful blogs can be and how easily accessible the information is for research and brand protection. I think there’s a definite future in this way of servicing new and existing customers and really allows companies to obtain candid feedback from real-world users, and not just people who are so fed up that they call customer service to complain — and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as it’s typically easy enough to go to a competitor. Here I am now, championing their efforts and feeling important to them.

I digress. Back to the WebTrends aquisition of Clickshift. Not to worry says Clickshift: same service, just a new logo. So I’m back to looking at their very attractive SEM model again. With 2007 budgets nearing finalization, whichever route I choose can’t begin until January, so I have some time to look over it in a little more detail and learn how exactly they will integrate with our site — and how it can co-exist with Omniture. I realize that technically speaking, the code easily co-exists on each page. It’s the data analysis and path-to-conversion process that is going to be somewhat of an overlap.

On one side, I will have Omniture reporting data on non-SEM conversions and then through Clickshift, I will have SEM-based conversions. Not having this data centrally managed requires me to consolidate both sets of data either in a spreadsheet or by some other means. This was the beauty with the Omniture model is that all SEM data and web analytics data could be rolled into a single report. While they haven’t exactly made that process painless (and I’m considering going to Omniture University to learn how to get the most out of their application), I take comfort in knowing that it’s all there if and when I need it. Time will tell. If Clickshift truely works, then the time savings alone in bid management rules and the day-to-day babysitting of SEM will far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of rolling data from 2 sources into 1 report/spreadsheet.

I deal with vendors on a daily basis, most of which are a pleasant experience. Then there are the others that are either, too pushy and only interested in the sale, and then there are others who cannot close the sale because of a simple question.

Take Peer 1, a managed hosting company who we are strongly considering to have handle SuperMotors.net hosting. Everything checks out on their website – professionally designed, up-to-date information, current press releases. Not much in terms of comments on their managed hosting service online, but that may be because this is still a relatively new market for managed hosting with not a lot of competitors and customers. The price looks good, the company looks good, but when I ask for 2-3 existing customer references (of equal or higher contract terms as we’re considering) from the sales rep I’ve been working with, I get nothing. Last communcation from the rep was on November 13th. It’s now December 5th. I’ve sent follow-up e-mails re-requesting 2-3 customer references on November 14th, November 26th, and December 1st.

I guess e-mails are not good enough and I’ll need to call. It shouldn’t be this hard for us to spend money. Not only is this annoying, but it speaks volumes about their commitment to customer service. Do they even have 2-3 customers that are going to give them top marks? Strike 1 for Peer 1!

Good news for ClickShift.com, not good news for me (read how I was considering Clickshift). Actually, maybe it’s good news. My biggest hangups with turning over SEM optimization from Omniture to ClickShift were:

• Losing control of the Google AdWords account that handled the keyword management for us
• Having to pay up-front for the cost of SEM rather than after the work was performed
• Using yet another vendor and introducing some overlap between Omniture and Clickshift

Now that WebTrends has purchased Clickshift, this may very well eliminate the possibility of using them as a vendor because they will be integrated with WebTrends (a direct competitor to Omniture) and we previously used WebTrends and switched to Omniture (plus, I really, really dislike the WebTrends UI). This purchase also helps explain why I heard nothing from Clickshift after saying I would be able to do business with them after the new year (when we get our new SEM budget). They were so focused on trying to get me to sign a contract that it almost seemed a little pushy and…well, strange. Hopefully being bought by WebTrends eliminates this and it can safely integrate with WebTrends services. Kudos to WebTrends for a very strategic aquisition. This gives them a significant competitive advantage over the other web analytics companies.

This may be a good thing for us in that I can focus on allocating funds towards Omniture’s professional search consulting to assist in creating optimized business rules. It still doesn’t feature the Clickshift automation and featureset, but maybe through requests and complaining from enough of their customers, they will add it in a future release of SearchCenter. I really hope they do (our corporate discount with Omniture is fantastic). The amount of manual labor that goes into managing each individual business rule in Omniture is significant. Clickshift was really onto something.

On a side note, I did receive the Google digital photo frame gift today.