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Tips for monitoring social media for your business

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.