This is Part 2 of a Social Media Policies Series. In Part 1, we discussed myths around your corporate social media policy. In Part 2, we continue the discussion diving into monitoring tools and research involved before you craft your corporate social media policies.
To get you and your company started in the research process, I recommend considering the following websites and tools to get you started in learning more about what is already being said so you can plan a strategy of how and when to respond and act.
- BackType.com. This website helps you monitor key word and brand mentions made on blog comments throughout the Internet.
- Google Alerts. Email alerts from Google.com/alerts can be sent daily or even hourly to your email inbox. Google notifies you after a series of key words in which you select are found by their online web crawlers. Yahoo Alerts provides a similar feature but for the Yahoo webcrawlers.
- BoardTracker.com. This website monitors mentions of selected key words on forums and boards. There are millions of forums and boards some specific to an industry, local region, or area of interest.
- Twilert.com. Twilert monitors the popular microblogging site Twitter and alerts you to mentions via email. Much like Google, Twitter is a powerful search engine that can be used as a research tool in real time. The more than 190 million users post comments in rapid succession. Most profiles and their information are searchable on the Internet.
- Paid Monitoring. Consider investing in a paid social media monitoring tool that goes beyond the above mentioned tools. These paid options can help you streamline your content montoring. Radian 6 as well as Buzz Ding offer different features and pricing options.
Employee meetings and focus groups in a comfortable and open environment are another effective way to learn how your employees are already using these online tools either for personal or professional use. It is important for these meetings to be conducted in a manner where employees feel able to talk freely and openly about how they are accessing these sites during work whether from their desktop work computer, laptop, or via mobile smart phone. I recommend other methods of capture information anonymously to further support your research and monitoring efforts using online survey methods or adding to your annual employee survey. These answers will allow you to make sure to address certain hot points of interest in your policy and training process for current employees when you introduce the new policy as well as new hire training for those during the onboarding and orientation process.
Photo Credit Flickr.
No comments:
Post a Comment