At the end of last month, social network LinkedIn rolled out some fairly major changes with regards to how the site’s groups feature works. LinkedIn is a really useful tool for developing your career; whether it’s for networking, sourcing new employees, or quickly finding out the answer to a difficult question. Since the groups feature was introduced last August it has proved an invaluable tool for networking with industry peers and keeping up with the latest news in your sector.

So what have they changed? Well first of all, conversations threads are a lot easier to follow; when group members post links to external pages they appear as they do in the news stream on the home page. This allows you to view important information much faster – essential if you’re trying to find something quickly and easily.

The success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has inspired LinkedIn to add a similar feature. So users can find the most popular and useful content, everyone has the chance to vote on whether they ‘like’ the information that’s been contributed. This saves time and lets everyone find the most important content without having to search through the irrelevant stuff.

The biggest change LinkedIn has made, and arguably the most exciting, is the profiling of the most influential users in each group. Previously, you needed to scroll through all of the conversations to find out who posted the best content. That has all changed, as LinkedIn now does the leg work for you by rating the top influencers.

Now users can find out who the most influential members are straight away and keep up to date with what they are contributing. The new changes let you choose to receive email updates when individual members post comments or ‘like’ a piece of content.

We are always preaching to clients about how useful LinkedIn groups are for discovering news and insight from industry peers. The changes make it a lot easier to find new content; but more importantly they let you find out who is regularly posting it.

Once you discover who is posting really good content make sure you follow them; find out if they have a blog (most LinkedIn users have links to their blogs or websites on their profile), and find their Twitter details (again these are usually found on the user’s profile page).

Once you are following them start engaging; ask them questions, offer advice and get involved! LinkedIn selects the most influential users based on the amount they post and the number responses their posts get. So start posting interesting and useful links and you too could become a top influencer!

Please note, this post was written by Catherine Pryce before she left the company.

Last time, I introduced you to the idea of buzz monitoring where companies can use tools, such as Radian6, to quickly identify where their brand name is being mentioned online and by whom. Such insight is invaluable as consumers are increasingly willing, and easily able, to share their thoughts with hundreds, possibly thousands of others through blogs, forums, reviews sites and social networks. Those companies that understand the need to engage with their customers through social media channels can use buzz monitoring tools to quickly identify disgruntled customers and respond to them in a public environment. Equally, buzz monitoring tools allow companies to see the positive conversations happening around their products and services, allowing their biggest fans (evangelists or advocates if you like) to be identified.

I’ve been a user of the more sophisticated tools, such as Radian6, for a while now. For most brands I have been monitoring the tool works fantastically well. However, what I have realised is that the use of a buzz monitoring tool is a great deal more difficult if you have a brand name that contains a generic word or phrase.

Let’s take the well-known chemist, Boots, as an example. On the high street Boots is an instantly recognisable brand with a store in most towns. However when it comes to social media, and in particular tracking their brand name, they are not just lost in the noise but effectively buried. Why? Because their brand name is a generic term. Finding mentions of ‘Boots’ (the chemist) is virtually impossible as it struggles to fight through the thousands of conversations happening online everyday on the topic of ‘boots’. Using Addictomatic, for example, I found just one Tweet mentioning Boots (a poor soul felt like their head was on fire having just washed their hair using tea tree oil – ‘going to Boots to get some head and shoulders’ was their plan of action!).

As you can see, this was nestled in a page full of conversations around UGG boots, cowboy boots and Wallmart. This makes it very difficult for Boots to fight through the noise.

Another example is to look at two of the giants of the mobile phone world, Vodaphone and 02. ‘Voda’ doesn’t necessarily mean anything (but if you are interested it means water in Russian!) but combined with the word ‘phone’ is a brand name that is highly distinctive, thus much easier to monitor using tools, such as Radian6. As a result, Vodaphone are well placed to monitor where they are being talked about online before responding promptly and accordingly. O2 however is a letter and a number, still a distinctive combination but seemingly more difficult to track in online conversations. A few months ago, Sales Director Ben and I, had become tired of the constant barrage of unsolicited text messages from O2. On a number of occasions we tweeted about our frustrations. Did we hear back from O2? No, we didn’t. Is this because they didn’t ‘hear us’ through the noise? It is difficult to know for sure in this instance. But bear in mind it only takes a space between the ‘O’ and the ‘2’, or a zero instead of the ‘O’ for tracking of this brand to be infinitely more difficult thus underlining the perils of generic branding, buzz monitoring and therefore reputation management.

Now you might say in the above examples; why not track more specific phrases, such as ‘Boots the pharmacy’, ‘Boots the chemist’, or ‘02 phones’? However, few consumers are likely to use such phrases when talking around the brand, particularly when using Twitter where the user is restricted by the 140 characters that a tweet allows. Equally, you could use the available filters in buzz monitoring tools but these are not always effective, particularly with a term such as ‘boots’ where there are potentially hundreds of associated words that would need to be filtered out. And using too many filters can almost have the opposite effect and leave you with very little noise at all!

What’s the solution?

For companies like Vodaphone, their choice of company name all those years ago, in the context of buzz monitoring, has to be considered more accident than design. However, in 2010, new companies coming to market need to carefully consider their choice of brand name. If you have aspirations of growing a successful business you need to accept that the Internet will play a pivotal role and inevitably customers will talk both positively and negatively about you online. It is therefore vitally important that you have the ability to track these conversations. A company name that uses one or a number of commonly used words may cause problems for you when it comes to monitoring the brand online. Should you dictate your entire branding strategy around the ability to track mentions of your company name? I perhaps would not go as far as that, as every situation is different, but it must certainly be a major consideration.

If you are a well-established company finding it difficult to track the conversations happening around your brand, you need to find ways of influencing the target audience to describe you in a way that makes it much easier to monitor noise. My solution is to use associated keywords in the information you push out to your community with the aim of encouraging the community to also adopt these keywords when talking about your brand.

To do this, you need to understand very clearly what it is that you stand for, what it is that makes you different to your competitors. Begin by creating a powerful message or tag line. You need to be crystal clear, able to sell your product, its features and benefits in a quick, keyword-rich, one-liner. Try and stick to around 140 characters or so. Think about relevant keywords that describe what you do and incorporate them into this description.

Online and offline strategies then need to be tied together so that the same, short, succinct message is used across all media. Online, a description of this kind should be consistently used in Meta data, anchor text, directory submissions, social media platform descriptions, press releases and so on.

Once you have established your message you can begin to use the closely associated keywords in online campaigns, promotions, hashtags and so on. Going back to our real life example, with Boots there are a number of keywords that you would closely associate with their products and services, ‘health’, ‘beauty’ and ‘pharmacy’ for example. Specific streams might be set up on Twitter when discussing certain product lines:

“Boots Health: Blog post from Boots on vitamins for winter colds”

“Boots Beauty: Get bikini beautiful in time for summer with these products (link) “

“Advice on quitting smoking from the Boots pharmacy #quitsmokingwithboots“

By doing so you are encouraging your audience to also talk about Boots using commonly associated keywords. The conversations happening around ‘Boots’ become a great deal easier to monitor because you have encouraged the target audience to use associated keywords in how they describe the company, which in turn makes the use of filters in Radian6 a great deal more effective.

It is worth adding this is a longer term solution to the issue faced by companies like Boots as and by no means fool proof. But in my ealru experiments with Radian6 it does work.

I’d love to hear from anyone at Radian6 with their thoughts.

Please note, this post was written by Catherine Pryce before she left the company.

What is buzz monitoring?

A buzz monitoring tool allows you to quickly identify where your brand name is being mentioned online and by whom. The same tools can be used to track keywords associated with your products, services or competitors, as well as any other words or phrases associated with your industry.

Google Alerts is an example of a very basic buzz monitoring tool but it has its limitations compared to the more sophisticated tools now available, such as Radian6 for example.

Why is buzz monitoring important?

Social networks, blogs, forums and review sites offer an open invitation for prospects and customers to say both positive and negative things about your company, depending on their experience in dealing with you. You cannot control what is being said; there is no point in trying. Instead, you should view these conversations as opportunities. Those spreading positive messages about you need to be nurtured; they are your brand advocates. Unhappy customers are offering valuable feedback that you might not otherwise have heard allowing you to learn and improve.

It is also important to consider that any content mentioning your company name, whether it is created by you or your customers, is likely to be found in search engine results. Furthermore, this is increasingly in real-time with information from Twitter, for example, found at the top of the search results page.

Therefore, if a disgruntled customer vents their anger on Twitter, it will not only be seen by their followers on this specific social network but may also feature in Google’s actual search results! Therefore, these days, search engine optimisation (SEO) involves monitoring and managing your reputation just as much as it involves the traditional optimisation factors, such as keywords and links.

What can you monitor?

Buzz monitoring tools continuously scan online spaces, including blogs, forums and social networks, such as Twitter for mentions of specified search terms and phrases, for example your company name. This allows you to quickly and efficiently discover the following…

• The websites where your audience is most active; allowing you to dedicate your time and resource to the right blogs, forums and social networks

• Your brand advocates; these are the customers spreading positive messages about your company to their network of friends, peers and social contacts. Being aware of, and engaging with these people, presents a multitude of benefits

• Negative sentiment; unfortunately, you can’t satisfy every customer and neither will you get it right every time. Disgruntled customers are increasingly turning to blogs, forums, review sites and social networks to share their experiences, which in turn can be seen by hundreds, maybe thousands of others. Engaging with these people and putting things right (in a very open and public manner) can reap rewards for forward thinking companies

• Sales opportunities; imagine if you could be alerted every time somebody was looking for information or advice on a product or service you sell. Being alerted in this way allows you to respond with useful information to answer a prospects question, which in turn helps position you as an expert. With the right approach this can have a positive impact on leads and sales

• The conversations happening around your industry; by understanding the desires, issues and concerns faced by your target audience you can in turn create useful content, which again helps position you as an expert or authority

What you must consider is that prospects and customers ARE talking online about your business or at the very least about your industry. The use of a buzz monitoring tool allows you to see these conversations as they happen, which in turn allows you to react and contribute to what’s being said. Buzz monitoring tools are infinitely more powerful than Google Alerts as they are more thorough and work in real-time alerting you to the conversations happening right now.

It is also worth adding that buzz monitoring should form one part of a properly planned social media strategy. In particular, guidelines and policies should be established for responding to comments, good and bad.

Next time, I’ll be exploring the problems that companies encounter with buzz monitoring tools when they have a generic company name, such as ‘Boots’.’

Until then…