This is yet another installment of my Optimization Summit recap.

After about six hours of high-level strategic thinking focused on the use of social media, I was ready for some real workshop-style nuts and bolts. In came Andy Beal to the rescue. His workshop, Social Media Monitoring, offered up some very specific tips on using some of today’s tools to know what’s really going on out there. Andy wrote Radically Transparent (a book about online reputation management) and is the editor of MarketingPilgrim.com. He’s also the founder of a new social media monitoring tool, Trackur.

Andy spent some time at the beginning of his workshop explaining why it’s important to monitor. His reasons included the list below:

• Reputation management
• Measure success of campaigns
• Decentralized customer service
• Spy on your competition
• Track industry news
• Improve press and blogger relations
• SEO

Andy passed along this excellent graphic that captures everything you should consider monitoring with social media.

Essential Monitoring Tools

Andy then went on to share what he considers to be the most relevant tools and resources when it comes to keeping a handle on social media. It captures a major theme I left with, which is that social media monitoring tools and similar services are cropping up at an amazing pace. To think that you can keep up with and truly know them all is completely unreasonable. I’m convinced it really comes down to picking the few that you’re comfortable with, which could mean the real differentiating factor is in user interface; many of them seem to measure the same stuff.

Here’s Andy’s list of essential tools for social media monitoring:

• Google Alerts: to monitor a specific page, use this: site:domain.com search term
• Bloglines: a great place to dive into newer blogs and more obscure places online that Alerts may overlook.
• Twitter search: a true must-use tool these days.
• Keotag: this is a pretty nifty resource that allows you to easily search many different platforms at once. You can also download OPML files to batch together lots of feeds.
• NetVibes: Andy suggested this can be a great free dashboard for your monitoring efforts.
• Web Analytics

Andy was quick to point out that it’s not for a lack of tools where we all fail with our monitoring efforts, but it’s in what we do once we have the data. I’m often guilty of gathering data which I know is valuable, and then doing nothing with it or about it. Andy preached that you have to know who’s responsible to make this data available, specifically mentioning R&D, Sales and Marketing by name. Among all the other cool insights you can get out of social media monitoring, you can quickly spot changing sentiment regarding your brand, and you can quickly react by altering your marketing and PR messaging.

Finally, Andy spend the last portion of his workshop walking us through a demo of his new program, Trackur. Andy was gracious enough to give us 30 day trials of the premium version, and I’m just now starting to dig into it. I don’t have a lot of experience with other social media monitoring tools (I know, shame on me!), but this one seems pretty simple and yet still robust. A real attractive part is that there is a free version, and the premium version is not near as hefty as some of the better known tools on the market.

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