Skills for the Social Media Ninja – Part 1 (Monitoring)

I love hearing the term Social Media Expert and seeing how widely debated the term is among different peer groups. I am far from “Ninja” status, but I can honestly say that I spend many hours training at the Dojo each day. I also love to hear when folks say “Your already a social media expert, it’s just a communications tool like a phone or email” That seems to be another sector of people who believe that typing a 140 character message into twitter makes them an expert. I am not putting down either of these parties, but what I am hoping to do with this series of articles is open your eyes up to the many skills of a social media ninja! Today I am going to focus on “Monitoring and Listening“. If you are an enthusiast, professional or budding professional I hope you get a lot out of this.

Ninja skills

I am not listing these skills in any specific order and I am not classifying them for business or personal. However, I will say that as a person that makes his living in the social media space that it may trend towards the useful rather than the mundane. Also, there are many, many advanced paid tools that you can learn, but I will stick with a few that are available free.

Monitoring Tools

There are many tools that can be used to monitor, or listen to the social media space. I think this is one of the first things any enthusiast or professional should master first. Tools include:

Google Search/Google Blog Search – there are quite a few ninja tactics that can be implemented in just pain and simple search. From simple quotes around a term to using advanced search there is much to be gained and learn.

Google Alerts/Yahoo Alerts – having the ability to be alerted any time a keyword is mentioned can be very valuable to the social media ninja. You have the ability to track any keyword or set of keywords with these applications. Alerts can be delivered by email or RSS feed and set from daily to by the minute.

BlogPulse – Blog Pulse is a trend tracking tool, but can also be used to track keyword mentions via RSS.

Social Mention – Social mention is a really easy tool to use to locate mentions of any keyword across the web. The tool is seperated by tabs that include blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audio, Q&A and All.

Monitoring Skills

This list of monitoring tools is surely not the end all be all, but in order to be a social media ninja you MUST learn how to use, the data that you are collecting. How is this data relevant to you, your company or your competitors? If you are working for a large organization that is mentioned many times per hour how do you weight and filter the data coming in? How do you track keywords that are important to you without getting buried under a sea of data?

Learn to Aggregate

By learning to aggregate all of your monitoring into one one location this will help a lot. RSS helps in that you can use multiple monitoring tools like the ones listed above but have them all collected in the same area. Start with one term and build up from there. If you are working for a company, start with the company name. If you are a lone enthusiast or an entrepreneur start by tracking your name and the name of your business. By doing this you will begin to develop a sense of the sentiment around your personal brand or organization. My preferred information collection box is Google Reader. All of your RSS feeds can be brought in and sliced and diced into different folders for organization. Google also lets you share this data with friends or colleagues.

How do I use the Data?

Let me preface this section by saying that different individuals and organizations will use data in different ways.

Data gathered while monitoring the web can be hugely valuable to an individual or organization. You are better able to figure out what your customers are thinking and help continually serve their needs better. The demographics in the social networking space tends to be a few years ahead of the trend on new products and services. The data collected here for free can give you a large sampling of the people using, complaining about, and evangelizing your product or service. Use monitoring tools to help you see into the future.

I hope you enjoyed this post on Monitoring the social media space. This series of articles is going to be quite comprehensive and will cover many of the things a lot of us don’t think about when we approach social media. I am not putting them in order of importance, but rather trying to cover the skills extensively. Please come back and join the conversation. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Photo Credit: Reyes

Skills of a Social media Ninja – Part 2 (Social Media School)

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Keith Burtis is a social media and digital marketing professional. If you or your company are looking to REV THE ENGINE on your digital efforts contact Keith today! Specialties include: Blog design/Integration, Custom Facebook Pages, Social, Digital and Interactive Content strategies.

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