Just been introduced to a free and easy tool online which gives you a quick insight into how a brand is represented on social media. It will tell you quickly how you are doing on facebook, youtube, twitter, flickr, blogs etc. Take a look at www.howsociable.com. Just type in your brand name and see what comes up. It's a good place to start. Once you have carried out the exercise you have a rough idea of where the most social media activity is taking place around your brand. So for example if blog posts come up the highest, you know you need a blogging relations policy so that you can engage with bloggers. If videos come up highly then you might want to consider advertising on video channels or creating video applications or setting up your own YouTube channel. If Twitter comes up highly, maybe you want to set up your own Twitter channels and monitor twitter and respond to tweets about your brand.
Making brands think about how sociable they are is a good introduction to the world of social media and a good way to get people thinking about how they are being represented online. What I like about this tool is that it presents all the information in an easily understandable format and there are good summaries. It's not perfect. Sometimes the search results confuse the name of the brand with other names which are not relevant. But that can happen on top search engines as well.
When a brand owner sees that there is a lot of social media activity in particular areas then hopefully they will see the value in supporting and connecting with that activity in order to generage additional goodwill and influence for the brand before their competitors do.
www.itsopen.co.uk
