Keyword Tracking of Brands

I am a social media intern for a company, and brand monitoring is basically what I am doing right now. It is definitely a full time job cause you have to really pay attention to see what others talk about your company. It is very interesting because sometimes we will be surprised what others think about your brand.  I think whether big company or small business should all need to work on keywords tracking of brands. It is good for crisis management, customer relationship and PR promotion. 

I think monitoring of brands is important for any size business. Companies should be aware of others talking about them, their services and products, across the web because these comments can help increase the company’s SEO. The same is true for monitoring personal brands. Individuals looking to present a professional brand or looking to be hired should monitor their name and look for ways to increase their SEO among popular employer search terms like “public relations professional with social media experience” or “public relations professional with non-profit experience.” 

For both large and small businesses, reaching out to online influencers can be an effective method of media outreach. Bloggers often write about very specific topics and therefore normally have a very targeted audience interested in that subject. If a small business, such as a sub shop, searches for bloggers, such as foodie bloggers, who are interested in finding the best quality meal for the best price, that business can reach out to that blogger about trying their product and insight coverage on the web, in turn, increasing their SEO and online presence. 

I also believe it is important for both large and small businesses to have active social media profiles on most major platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, so that users talking about their brand can link back to their profiles. This helps any size business track discussion about their brands more easily, and allows the business to respond and engage with this consumer. 

 

I think keyword tracking of brands is a very important piece of any digital marketing strategy. While it's impossible to truly track and follow EVERY person who is talking about your business, it's imperative to understand things that are trending about your brand, so you can get the general idea of what your customers think. Not only is it important to track what's being said about your brand, it's also important to understand where the conversation is going in your general market.

Take the camera brand Nikon as an example. While it's very useful to see what people are posting and communicating about using your brand name, "Nikon", it's also important to see what people, consumers and bloggers are saying about photography and cameras in general. This way, as a brand, you can move forward in your marketing strategy and be in places and say things that are relevent to the current conversation taking place in the digital forum. By doing this, you can connect your brand with a place in the mind and not just a place on the web.

I find it very interesting to read focused topic blog sites, there are a couple sites I frequent that provides news and review fashion items. Two great examples are purseblog and highsnobiety, those two sites has a huge amount of following, and gives ample option for people to spread the word of fashion items linked on the site to twitter, facebook, youtube and other social media websites.

When I started this homework assignment I followed a brandd that was fairly easy. But in turn it still was work put into it. I never knew how many outlets there are to promote your brand. Mom and Pop places honestly have a really easy way to make themselves known these day. Tracking brands turned out to be pretty cool too. I never knew how many people out there actually cared enough to write abut these brands and things in their personal sites and thing. Optimizing as much of this social internet world is the key to success aparently.

When doing this assignment I did realize that it was tough to really understand tracking a brand when it is a small business, let alone a new business, in which I made the plan for. However, I did want to do it for my sister's chiropractic office since it was challenging and would actually be something I could help a business with. So instead of completely searching her brand, which I offered suggestions in how to do that. I tracked the career field. I think it is as essential as tracking the brand in this case. To follow what other chiropractors are doing on social media is vital to know where she should be and helps her engage with the community. So in additon to tracking and monitoring your own brand for your business you can't forget about your competitors. I believe businesses should be tracking and monitoring (not as often perhaps) what is being said about other businesses.

I chose to follow the Margaritaville brand and I am amazed at the number of alerts I keep receiving from google.  I just received this new one which I thought was very interesting about the new casino in Las Vegas.....where is the beach ????  http://ftnnews.com/other-news/12857-margaritaville-and-flamingo-to-open-margaritaville-casino.html

I understand how older mom and pop shops will have a harder time to build their brand image because they aren't capitalizing on the social media outlets, such as twitter. However, small up coming businesses can capitalize on this aspect and become more well known through theses sites. Two of my friends are starting up business and since we are all in college, some out of state, can spread the word to new people and new markets. Word of mouth alone can drive buzz to the company site as well as the unique networks we have all built up over the years.

Smokin' Mad Love (SML) is a local longboard manufacturing company and distributor placed out of Grand Haven, Michigan, my hometown.  I became part of this growing company's legacy last May when I bought my first custom longboard.  They currently have 676 Likes on their Facebook Fan Page, and the company has 120 followers on Twitter.  A lot of these include different pro longboarding teams, surf and skate magazines, as well as a variety of surf and skate companies.  Silverfish Longboarding is a online longboarding community and forum that is following SML on Twitter.  Wind, Waves, and Wheels Inc. is a surf and skate blog that posts about SML updates. 

This may have been the most involved homework assignment we had. I begun my assignment much more ambitiously than I finished it. It was originally my intention to search about 8 different digital media types, then I realized what a mammoth of an undertaking that would be just for this assignment. Instead I took a more laid back approach. I can definitely see who brand monitoring can become a full time job.

So far I have had two internships at two very large companies. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Ford Motor Company. Both very large, however, very different. One is a global and distributes their products worldwide, while the other is only statewide. Ford Motor Company sells cars, a physical and highly competitive product, while BCBSM sells health insurance, a relatively misunderstood, confusing product in an oligopoly of an industry. They are similar, however, because they both understand the importance of social media and tracking their brands. I found it incredibly interesting that Ford Motor Company and BCBSM have developed their company’s own personal social media websites to communicate with their audience and start a discussion about their products and company. They both have very advance social media strategies with two expert and prominent bloggers leading the way and carving the path for the companies. And of course they both have twitter feeds and facebook accounts, specific media pages for all of their press releases that they deliver straight to their consumers. The Vice President of communications at BCBSM even tweets dozens of times a day! I strongly believe in both of these companies because I know so much about them and the things they are doing in communities and with social media, other people are able to see it too, which positively impacts a brand’s image. Although these two companies are not targeting the same consumers to purchase their products, they are both communicating and developing relationships with their consumers, which will benefit them in the end.

This week I tracked Barefoot Wine & Bubbly.  It was easy to find information on the brand since it has both Twitter and Facebook pages.  The Barefoot website itself is pretty great.  It provides lots of information, and costumer testimonials as well as lots of other engaging activities.  There aren't a whole lot of bloggers since this is a "cheap" wine and many wine bloggers don't like to take the time to write about these cheap wines, but then one of this company's goals is to provide people with affordable and good tasting wine.  What little I did find on barefoot said that for a cheap wine it was pretty good. So I guess in this case cheap isn't necessarily a bad thing to be associated with. 

I did not necessarily follow a brand but a person as a brand. LeBron James. He has been scruntinized all year on his decision to go to Miami to win a championship leaving his home state behind. Last night he and the Miami Heat lost the NBA Finals to the Dallas Mavericks and LeBron's Twitter EXPLODED!! He has been the talk of the town and with him losing, it was joyous for all the tweeters. He is my favorite player and to see the amount of tweets, joking, calling LeBron out, was just unbelievable. LeBron James is his own brand and represents the NBA. It is truly shocking how many people tweet and hate the brand of LeBron James. He tweeted last night after the game and that just ignited more and more tweets. The brand of LeBron James is actually quite interesting for the NBA and I feel that it is crutial that he interacts with the "haters" and responds in a classy way.

This week I decided to track Jordan shoes, the Retro styles. I'm not a collector and I wouldn't call myself a fan so it was really interesting tracking these on twitter. I realized that they release a certain style every month, and collectors would snag them right away when it releases at midnight. Not only do websites shut down because of crazy traffic, but twitter with hashtags, depending on the style that just came out, becomes a trend topic. I also found out that people are willing to pay above the retail prices just to collect these basketball shoes, I guess they call them collector items, which is interesting to me. I think a brand would have to be really popular to track them, otherwise it would be hard to know what trend is going on if it's so small and only in a certain town or city. I do believe that monitoring a brand is a full time job, because if it was a super popular or big brand, it would be tough to keep track of what people are saying about the item because of all the feedback it gets, but who knows it could be fun too.

I chose this week to monitor the department store Kohls. I often shop at Kohls, and even have a Kohl's card because I frequently shop at their stores. I thought that it would be interesting to see what others in social media were saying about the store and what kind of brand image it has. Before research -- what I thought of the store is that they have quality items for a reasonable price, they carry bigger name brands like Vera Wang, and they offer great promotional offers like Kohls cash. Many of my friends and family are also loyal customers of Kohls. What I found after researching the web was that a lot of people support this statement and are even bigger fans and some even shop exclusively at Kohls. On the other hand everything wasn't all perfect there we reviews that the customer service wasn't great, and sometimes it was difficult to return items etc. I feel like something either has to be terrible or really good for someone to blog about it or create social media. I wouldn't go out of my way, personally, to write something about Kohls online if it was just an average store.

It is amazing to think that social media and brand monitoring is such a vital and important aspect of a brands overall reputation and representation. I decided to do my brand monitoring on Best Buy. Best Buy has many excellent techniques used to monitor their brand. They run a blog that is ran by their CMO which shows that they have upper management that cares about the consumers interests and concerns. They have a forum called Best Buy Unboxed which they allow consumers to go and discuss different products and can gain feedback to make their company better. Best Buy has a very user friendly facebook that even allows shoppers to shop off of Facebook. Best Buy uses their Twitter as a way to better understand their consumers and have a customer service tool to help satisfy unhappy customers. Another positive that they have is that they have other bloggers that like to discuss Best Buy's lateset social media innovations.  StayonSearch is recognized by google has the top blogger to Best Buy and ranks number one in SEO but Best Buy gets a lot of publicity from bloggers because their is multiple pages of blogs on Best Buy and their social media innovations.

As a Los Angeles Native, choosing a "big name" was no issue as I immediately chose my childhood team, the Los Angeles Lakers. As suggested, I chose a larger more well known keyword, and its benefits are obvious. I was literally able to find thousands of posts, tweets, blogs, and articles on the Lakers franchise and team, a feat undone had I went the small mom and pop copany route. Now this if anything, has led to some sympathy for those smaller owned businesses as they will truly have to work harder and be smarter to create the same, especially more, revenue, comments, and supports as a larger company would. Now, I've found that the greatest social media asset here for the Lakers is there Twitter accounts/profiles/and even tweets posted with their name/recognition/brand included in it. The Lakers have obviously done a great branding job on the courts and online, as most comments I read were positive. Much bloggers included the Lakers keyword in their blogs and it really allows for conversation and action, as folks are representing and speacking for a company, in this instance, a professional basketball team. Moreover, Lamar Odom has a Twitter, along with fellow Lakers. Here, we see the franchise humanizing itself and brand through yup, you guessed it, social media. The biggest influencer, however will always be the professional and expert basketball networks and informants, as really they are the known and accepted gatekeepers of this kind of information.

A metric to use for the value of people tweeting about the Lakers brand is simple. For one, the number of followers and their interests shows your credibility and talents as a writer. Next, the number of retweets that are posted from you are another excellent way to test who is doing something and how it matters. And lastly, more feedback. If you are a tweeter who gets messages, and more importantly, questions about the company you are representing, your word is gold, and you have far met the metrics that show your value.

-Dee

I really understand what you mean regarding the fact that it takes forever to monitor certain brands. In my research too, I will agree that it is much easier to track large companies as opposed to tracking smaller ones. For this weeks assignment, I decided to track Nissan as I work for a Nissan dealership. This was very easy becuase Nissan is such a recognizable and large brand. Being foreign too, many of the tweets I  read and facebook posts were very passioante with both positive and negatrive comments on Nissan. Through monitoring NIssan, I keyed in on the keywords they use in an effort to better promote themselves.

I don't have the luxury of making brand monitoring a full time job, but I know it's more important than ever. I do what I can to monitor my college's brand - mostly via Google alerts and Hootsuite. However, I believe the key for the future of my college on the Web is to identify brand ambassadors - probably alumni and faculty who are willing to lengthen the ties they have with the college and bring them into their networks. I've recently been made aware of interesting uses of http://klout.com. I think I can really use this to find those people who are our brand influencers and form stronger relationships with them. I've also been trying to work with alumni board members to work in conjunction with me to spread messages further. However, many of them do not use social media enough to influence a network of people.

I choose to monitor Kate Spade as she’s one of my favorite designers. It was easy to find stuff about this brand on twitter, linked-in and facebook. I found a lot of information  but had trouble sifting through all of it to find the important stuff. I don’t think I could be a brand monitor as a full time career. It’s exhausting to try and think of new keywords and #hashtags to search for. I can only imagine how difficult it would be to do this for a smaller, Mom and Pop type brand.  I found mostly positive feedback for Kate Spade. Their brand seems to target at a very specific type of girl and they do a good job of marketing their brand towards that type of person. I found very little negative feedback other than remarks towards the poor quality of their knock off bags which really isn't Kate Spade's fault. They make a darn good bag, it would be hard to mimic.

For this week's assignment I focused on the company Mid American Pompon, which is located in Farmington Hills, MI. I worked for this company for 4 years and I loved it very much. One important thing that I have noticed is that they do not blog nor is there anyone blogging about them. I strongly feel that for a person to blog about the actual company that company needs to have a blog themselves. As of now there really is no big influencer in promoting the company and tagging them in status updates or tweets. I feel like one important metric to use would be signing up with a tracking device and typing in that person's name to research it, or even following them on twitter; it's not too hard to monitor a tweeter and someone who is interested in your brand. Last week we talked about SEO and the major importance involved in it. I strongly feel that having an awesome SEO is getting in touch with someone who has the knowledge in that particular category. Remember, that a company should have a landing page, a website, a blog, and be up on social media constantly. Mid American Pompon does not have a landing page but they are extremely close to the top when you search them. I have learned a lot this week about monitoring a company. 

I would definitely agree with the statement that brand tracking is a full-time job; this is especially true for large world-wide and nation -wide brands. I chose to do a brand that is very well-known in the area, but isn't so well-known nationwide. I did my assignment this week on Douglas J. There are a wide variety of responses people had to Douglas J. There are both a lot of good and an aweful lot of bad. Because people care a lot about their hair, this seemed to be a hot topic for some when they tweeted or wrote Facebook statuses about Douglas J. Whether it was a good or a bad experience, people definitely had something to say about it. Using Google, Facebook, local blogs, and Twitter really helped me see what people thought about the business overall- most considered it highly respected which I myself agree with.

Any brand can be monitored, but it may come with an expensive price and/or extensive research. Depending on how small the brand is and who exactly they are targeting, their research might stay contained in a local area. It is possible to find consumer reviews, but a 3rd-party reporting tool may need to be used and they are usually not used used by every business and not cheap. Tools such as comScore, eMarketer, Mintel (etc.) can all be used to track the brand. These sites can report almost every characteristic that is useful for the brand's users (demographics, psychographics, behavioral factors, income, monthly unique viewers, number of average daily viewers, average time spent on the site by the viewers, user engagement). The list can go on and on, but for smaller brands they probably don't need all of this information and especially at the outrageous cost. I decided to track down American Express and monitor the brand. American Express is obviously doing something right to remain one of the top 100 brands in America year after year. They have exclusive deals and give-a-ways on their Facebook page and Twitter page. They are also connecting with their fans that are posting about American Express in their Twitter pages. American Express replies directly to their fans with on their brands page. They even have their Twitter account show up on Google's first page when you search the name (SEO). The coolest part about American Express using the top social media sites to stay connected with their consumers/potential consumers --- they are using innovation within the sites. The American Express Facebook fan page has its own Points App, and their Twitter page has its own hashtag's that users can search for promos/deals/any other information. Keep up the good work, AMEX!

I have definitely found that big businesses are relatively easy to track. It shows that it is very obvious that these companies really benefit from this exposure. I typed coca cola into getsatisfaction.com and found this qoute:

"Nothing compliments a burger and fries like an ice cold Coca-Cola, period."

I chose Birkenstock as my brand to monitor this week. I found this brand to be interesting to try and monitor. First, it’s a global brand, so I had to sift through the different languages to find comments I could understand. Second, it seems that most of their product is sold through retailers, so there are a lot of online retailer sites and sales links to sort through! But with some work, I did find ways to monitor the brand.  According to Social Mention, Birkenstock has a 2:1 sentiment of positive mentions over negative and a 6 minute average per mention. While Birkenstock is being talked about plenty on the web, they do need to increase their engagement. I didn’t come across any Twitter replies, and they seem to only reply to Facebook posts once a week or less. I do like that they had a Google profile to find their official accounts!

I knew about several of the brand monitoring tools and sites before this assignment, but I still discovered or learned about plenty more!

Because I use it frequently, I chose StumbleUpon for my brand. I figured there would be a lot of Twitter updates and Facebook posts, but  I was actually surprised to see how many blogs there were.  Being that StumbleUpon is mostly self-explanatory, it came as a shock to me when I found "troubleshooting" blogs and "frequently asked questions" blogs, but I was also very pleased. I thought "Yes, this will make it easier for me", but much to my disappointment it was still harder than I expected.  I would definitely have to agree that brand monitoring, hashtag tracking, and google alerts is a full-time job.  Hours and hours had gone by by the time I had started making some progress, although it was a very insightful experience.

In doing this assignment, I chose Kohl's department store. I was surprised to find that they were not very mentioned in social media because I thought they were a very well known brand. Especially because they have such a well known loyalty program attached to their credit card, and sales almost always, I thought they would be much more well-known in the social media world. Negative reactions will definitely hurt your brand, but I also thing that not having any feedback is not doing well for your brand.

As noted in previous homework assignments, I do the digital media for Keller Williams Realty. The first thing I researched was their profile on getsatisfaction.com. It was completely empty, but then I realized something. The realty industry is based on their agents. People generate reviews based the customer service they receive from their personal agents. I know with my team, the agents receive their own reviews from their clients. With this, our goal was to create a website to spread community awareness for the city of Grand Ledge. It is to be a means of communication. People can communicate within the Facebook group page, Twitter, and finally leaving comments on the Wordpress blog. Feedback is very important in driving consumers to these local businesses and especially driving traffic to the community-centered blog. With the Keller Williams brand itself, every agent does their own thing to manage their way of business. Obviously, there is the corporate Facebook for KW where viewers are updated on the latest in the realty industry. But in terms of staying local, it is individuals like me who put our own effort into creating our own brand awareness and monitoring.

After being assigned this assignment I chose Red Bull as the brand I would monitor because of my love for snowboarding and my fascination with their non-traditional forms of advertising and staying relevant. Besides the typical things I knew Red Bull did differently then their compeition such as the "Red Bull Air Show" and documentaries such as "Project X: Shuan White" on Fuel TV, I learned of new ways they stay relevant online after implementing my brand monitoring strategy. Besides Red Bull's official website having a friendly and easy to use website interface, I noticed they are consistantly updating their latest videos and photos along with news among products, events, and sponorships. I was also impressed with how much of a personal touch the Red Bull Twitter account has, initially I thought it would be just a corperate twitter account with random updates on product offers, but instead they were constantly interacting with their followers and fellow supporting companies via real conversation instead of just generic corperate "mumbo-jumbo". After montoring this brand I have realized they want a more personal connection with all of their consumers and to not seem like a faceless corperation, and how this is being accomplished is through the large effort Red Bull has shown with constitently updating all of their online websites. Which also helps keep them; stay relevant in everyday conversation, create a buzz, continue traffic among websites, and most importantly keep their consumers involved and interacting with the brand.

I chose to monitor What up Dawg. W.U.D. is the new hot dogg shop on MAC that has just recently opened up. They benefit from sites like facebook and twitter. There is a Facebook page for the resturaunt and whoever runs it is always posting specials oof all sorts and promoting the brand on a daily basis. Through sites like this people give their input and testimonials. The buzz created also generates a significant amount of word of mouth. As for bloggers...well the brand is relatively new so we'll look to that in the near future I'm sure.

I chose to monitor Red Bull. I was surprised to find just how diverse the company is. From NASCAR to X Games, their company sponsorships are never ending. I elected to monitor them because there seems to be an abundance of competitors lately that have been taking claim in their market. Companies such as 5-Hour Energy, Rockstar, and the now banned Four Loko beverages all seem to have a mix of excitement and controversy surrounding their brands. I was interested to find out how Red Bull is maintaining their market share via the Web and positioning themselves against their competitors. What I found was that Red Bull is much farther ahead of the curve in their market in terms of SMO and consumer loyalty.

I chose to monitor Jimmy John's this week, and since this is a larger brand there is a ton of information on it.  But for smaller companies, it can be clutch for them to use brand monitoring. A smaller company needs the information that is found by doing this.  A local sub store may not have the reach of Jimmy John's, but it can use the information to see how it's competing with other local competitors. Twitter and Facebook are also a great way for these smaller companies to see what their customers think about them, how they can improve, and what they are doing good already. In short, using brand monitoring techniques can be extremely helpful for not only big businesses, but local businesses also.

This week I'm looking at Target and it has been fairly easy to find information on the brand because it is so large. One thing that is important with a brand with a name like Target is that you include "Target Store" in the search to avoid picking up anything with the word Target in it. Just by doing basic google and blog searches I was able to fine many positive and negative blogs and individual entries on Target stores. Many people do not agree with the brands business practices and complain about their customer service. Reading the comments on the blogs were very helpful because there were multiple opinions and examples given on the same page. The interesting thing I found about their store is that people either really love it or really hate it. I also found that the offical Twitter account for Target tries to communicate with the people that are mentioning their store. They frequently reply to customers complaints with numbers to call in order to solve their problem. 

I chose to monitor Kohls for our homework assignment this week and was able to gather a large amount of information through Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and a couple of other brand monitoring web sites.  It was easy to monitor the Kohls brand since it is such a large company and has a very recognizable brand image to its consumers.  Searching for keywords such as Kohls, sales, discounts, and experience resulted in positive feedback from most social media web site users.  I also noticed posts and comments with negative responses to customer experience and clothing quality which gives Kohls the inside information on how their consumer really feels after a store visit.  Using Tumblr and my own blog account, I was able to find a few bloggers who are fans of the Kohls brand and had blogged about sales and current store promotions.  With the large dependency on social media today I think its really important for businesses to be tracking and monitoring their brands via social media sites to gain the most honest feedback possible.

The brand I chose to monitor this week is Silpada Designs Sterling Silver Jewelry. Silpada Designs is a growing and popular brand with loyal customers, but because it is sold only through independent representatives at home shows (similar to Tupperware), most people who don't wear their jewelry do not recognize the brand. I tried using the tools suggested to research this brand to find out what people are saying but had limited success. Using Google Search I found that Silpada is only mentioned in a few blogs and I got zero results through Technorati. I had better luck with Twendz and learned that 96% of the Twitter comments about Silpada are positive or neutral. When I clicked to read the negative comments, I discovered they weren't necessarily negative. My guess is that Twendz automatically assigns a negative connotation to certain words. This made me a little less confident in relying on Twendz for accurate assessments. I found the best source of consumer feedback is from Silpada's Facebook page. The company regularly posts news, questions, photos and videos to Facebook and their loyal customers respond quickly and passionately about their love of the jewelry and the brand. Facebook fans can also write on Silpada's wall and Silpada is quick to respond to the positive and negative comments, quickly working resolve any problems their customers have.

I thinnk that brand monitoring is a MUST if you are a company. Even for the small businesses it is good to keep tabs on what your consumers are saying about you. When I am looking to ourchase anything I usually do a lot of research (I'm very picky) and one negative thing that I find about a product or service turns up as a major red flag. Companies that have nothing but bad said about them on the internet and are completely unaware are just hurting themselves. With all of the sites that are out there to help you do this for FREE it semes likt everyone should jump on the bandwagon and see what the public thinks. I've learned in my life that all criticism can be good criticism if you choose to look at it the right way.

I previously worked at an Apartment Complex for over a year doing their social media and other marketing projects. During this time I learned how important it is to understand the residents and know their needs. The hardest part about this is that most of the time residents won't tell you their thoughts on your community unless they are asked or upset. There are many blogs and other sites that are out their for residents of apartment communities to voice their opinions and frustrations with their community. While working there I frequently viewed these websites to see what current and past residents had to say about our community. Granted, most of the time these were not good comments but that let me share with my boss different ideas or things we could change to make our residents feel better  about their choice in living at our community. I would simply Google our community and clicked the sites that would pop up, at the time I was unaware of other options and I am pretty sure my bosses would not have been willing to pay for them.

I could see how brand monitoring could be the missing link for a lot of companies when it comes to marketing online. A lot of big businesses may over look the fact that they are putting a lot of information out there but never really following up on the effectiveness of it. It drives me crazy reading our book and seeing how many times Scott mentions giving valuable information, and then still showing up on sites that are just huge billboards shrunk down to fit my screen...if that’s what I was looking for I would have drove down I-75 to find it. This area is very interesting to me for that reason, I think this is a key component for any company's online marketing strategy, you can have the best plan in the world but if no one is using it, finding it, relating to it and you don't know, you can never grow as a company. This is defiantly an area that if well understood could be a huge  to make the students in New Media Drivers License more desirable to companies.

In one of my classes last semester, we had a presentation from a couple who work exclusively doing brand monitoring out of Chicago. They used Radian 6, which another person mentioned, and I found it really cool how much they were able to track trends and everything and it definitely seems like something that a lot of companies really overlook. I was inspired for this week's assignment by my terrible internet connection compliments of Comcast. I realized how many other people I know who have Comcast and absolutely hate it. I took a class with Dr. Richard Cole last semester and his advice when you want to take the first step in brand monitoring is to Google your company name followed by "sucks". Doing that with Comcast produced some pretty crazy results. People have entire websites and blogs dedicated to how much they hate Comcast and its customer service. Coming up with a brand monitoring strategy for them will definitely be pretty difficult given how little POSITIVE comments there are out there, but it seems like as of right now they're not doing very much to change people's minds. That will definitely be a big first step in the right direction. If they can't always provide superior service, they should at least always be striving to provide good customer service and outreach.

I think brand monitoring is an extremely important and useful strategy for any business. As you mentioned, it's much easier for big businesses, but there are always people talking; it's just a matter of finding out what's being said. I work at a leasing office for a new apartment complex in the area and it's really important to us to hear what our residents and potential residents are saying about us. Sometimes people post on our Facebook page and write negative comments, so we do everything we can to try and rectify any issues people are having in order to create a good image for our complex. Because it's a brand new community, it's especially critical that people get a good impression of our property and our management. We already use Facebook and Twitter, but hopefully we can start implementing some of these other tools in order to gain a greater perspective of our audience. 

For my internship this summer, we are using Radian6 to track everything people are saying about us. Unfortunatly, it is expensive and not all business's have the means to utilize and buy this tool. For the bussiness I followed, Walmart, they certainly would. However, for the social media internship I had over the school year the best ways to track what people were saying were to use Google and to just ask them! It's amazing what people will tell you once you get them going. Everyone has an opinion, and most people want to be heard.

For this week's assignment I worked on monitoring the brand T.J. Maxx. This brand is difficult to monitor because unlike a traditional retail outlet, each location of this company may offer a slightly different variation of product than the next. No two stores are alike! So as a result, each customer may have a slightly difference experience than the other. Monitoring keywords the keywords that most people think of when they think of T.J. Maxx will be important as part of the overall monitoring process. Things like "shopping", "clothing", "discount", "bargain", "deal", and others are immediate thoughts people think of...but based on location certain customers may think of particular items, products, or designers that they attribute to their local T.J. Maxx. Getting an overall feel for the online presence and reaction of this company may prove to be a challenge as a result.

I decided to use the brand American Apparel for this assignment. Something that confused me, though, was what keywords to look up. Of course, I started with just the brand, but I wanted to know more about what people were saying about the company. This is a well known company and it has had some controversy in the past and it is up there on the web for people to find, but the tweets that I have found are less likely to talk about these issues. So what do people see as more creditable? The consumers that actually use and approve of the brand or the articles from professionals. If they do think that consumers are the more vital source, they still need to pay attention to the negative feedback. This can change minds, even in a small way and I'm still figuring out how to exactly deal with this mixture.

This week's assignment could not have come at a better time. Last week I gave a presentation at our company to begin the discussions with senior leadership on our need to start to participate actively in social media. As part of the presentation I showed a few examples of our competitors on social media. Then, I was able to show our leadership that whether we are actively involved or not, our company is already appearing in social media. This really got their attention. I spent some time last week visiting sites like socialmention.com, technorati and searching Google blogs. I looked for our company name, names of some of our competitors and a few key industry terms. Because ours is a very niche oriented industry, and our types of products are aimed directly at the people who work on the shop floors of manufacturing facilities, it has been assumed that social media is not going to be a useful way of reaching or interacting with our customers. But, my limited investigations cast a bit of doubt on our previous thinking. Although the results were not overwhelming, I did come across a few blogs, and tweets that had relevancy. I also discovered that our employees in places like China and India were beginning to become frustrated with our lack of a social media presence and had started to develop LinkedIn and Facebook profiles on the company without our knowledge, or authorization. I put examples of this in my presentation and it convinced them that we need to address social media now, not later. As a result of the presentation, I have been tasked to do more research on what is going on in social media in regards to our brands, our competitors and the industries we serve. Then, utilize that information to help form a social media policy, and a social media strategy. This week's assignment will give me an even greater level of knowledge and confidence to address the task.

I was brand monitoring before I even knew what it was.  As I have indicated in the past, I love to travel.  For years I have been monitoring my travel arrangements by what people post online.  I always check different sites and see what resorts are rated higher and what people who have actually stayed there have to say.  My dilema now is this.....do I trust who is behind the writing????  Or is it just a PR person for Sandals, Marriott, etc going online posing as a regular guest making the post...hhhm This section has taught me to dig a little deeper and spend a little more time.

I focused on the brand lululemon athletica for the brand monitoring and listening assignment. Overall the brand gets a B-... because they are en route to successfully implementing a great brand monitoring strategy, but still miss crucial aspects. The brand has a well-developed online presence on various social media sites and also has a company blog. But when I tried to find other sources of influential social media, like opinion leader-bloggers and review sites, I found a pathetic profile on getsatisfaction.com. There were also only a few small-scale twitter accounts and blogs that truly integrated the brand into their content. Upon these discoveries I thought, "How can people NOT be talking about this brand!?" I know many people who rave about lululemon athletica and yet there is nothing representative of this online. The brand should start interacting more with social media communities and including hashtags or other conversation-appropriate mentions of their products to try and get the online community talking/thinking about them.

Monitoring Brands was nothing I ever thought twice about. For example, with my twitter I follow accounts that I want to know more about. I follow celebrities to keep in touch with the fashion world as well as the gossip that is going on. Same thing with athletes. I want to hear about what they are doing, how they feel about their game, and other players. I also follow companies that I would be interested in working for, to see what kind of  company they are and if they ever post internship opportunities. I look for companies I am interested in and places I shop because they tweet deals and things like that. But if I miss a tweet I don't specifically search the company to see what they have been doing and track what they have said. Social Media has a big aspect on companies now a days. With all the technology that is out there, companies need to find their niche and make it work for them. It does matter how many tweets and how many likes they have on facebook.