With the maturing of the social network space we see companies becoming professionally active in social media. This leads to the development of specific tools for businesses. And depending on firm size, this may also include the establishment of a Social Media Command Center; Gatorade and Dell both have one for example. Using the Forrester report Best Practices: The Social Intelligence Command Center, we will try to describe this topic in somewhat more detail.

“There’s an app for that” is a famous statement to indicate that in today’s market, just about for anything you want online, there’s a downloadable app for your smartphone. That slogan really is a true given also for the market of social media tools. Although the market is still developing, new tools appear and others disappear or get bought by larger companies, there is an array of little tools for many specific needs. There is not always just one, complete tool that provides all your needs.

The tool that is suitable for organization x, need not be the tool that is suitable for organization y, or your business in particular. It depends on the specific need that you and / or your company have. For many simple and often useful free tools the motto: “Just try” is suitable. But be careful on what tool(s) you authorize. It would be a pity when a spamtweet is sent from the company account that you, after many discussions with management, finally got to work. Also for the paid tools (unless the investment is limited) I would walk through the standard steps for software selection you can find below:

• Need. Describe what the tool should do for your business. Why is that important? What does it add? What is your budget?
• Describe the requirements. What should the tool do? What conditions would you add to that that? Do not forget to prioritize, because not everything may be even important.
• Create a longlist. Map the tools that are available. Do a search on Google, ask colleagues, advisors, etc. to provide an overview of what is out there. Connect with companies in other industries of comparable sizes on this matter. Being successful in social media requires a passion and that passion often makes people willing to share their experience.
• Create a shortlist.Ask suppliers for information and make a first selection of the tools that are not (able) to meet your key requirements by pushing them aside.
• Sort your shortlist shortlist.Take, again, a look at your tools by checking all your requirements, but now in detail. To which extend does the tool meet your requirements already by default, and what additions are possibibly needed?
• Continue talking with your top3. Step into the conversation with the three parties that best match your requirements. Share your findings with the tool supplier. Ask whether it is possible to get into contact with a client for direct, independent in-the-field feedback about the tool. Try to get a free of charge (or minimal cost) trial period where you can test the tool.  Software is in daily practice is sometimes considerably different from the perception that you get based on the packaging.
• Finalize your choice. Evaluate, create a top 2 and start the final negotiations.

Does one size fit all? To help you get started below you can find some 10 basic questions that every tool vendor should be able to easily answer. It helps you to discover the differences.

• Indexation: Which social media networks are indexed? What about traditional news sites? Video? pictures? what is indexed only article or even comments? How to deal with aggregate data from other sites? Own bot that passes sites or EEE is done using RSS feeds? Will the original data stored? How long?
• Speed: How fast does the indexation place? Vary by network / site? How are the rules that the site offers with respect to indexing bots? What SLAs apply?
• Sentiment: Sentiment Is determined? If so how is this determined and how pure is this? Learning system is based on possible correction of the user in this area?
• Spam / Noise: How sharp the query can be set to spam / preventing noise? Learning system is based on possible correction of the user in this area?
• Engaging: Can the user from the tool to respond immediately put online? A piece of workflow management offered? For example, an item can be assigned to a user? Is it possible for different authorization levels (self-supply input vs. live set)?
• Open: How open is your platform? Is it possible to export or import business? Is there an API available? Are there additional third-party tools that can be hung in your system for additional features?
• Reporting: What reporting formats, the system and to what extent are these customizable?
• Alerting: Can you set alerts, and if so, what types of alerts are (SMS, email etc) and what triggers (extra volume, specific term, specific users, more than x number of followers) can be set?
• Training & Support: How much training is required of the tool and what forms of support provided? Is a kind of user group that users with support staff to talk about such improvements? There is 7 * 24 hour support?
• Costs: what are the costs and how what is the basis (number of users? Buzz volume? Amount purchased modules?) Is there a possibility of EEE during free trial period without functional limitations?

Especially the number and variety of simple, basic tools is booming. Below you’ll find a small selection of some handy little tools to get you started. You need to realize that a “simple” tool can be a perfect match for your needs.

Hootsuite

http://youtu.be/NXpYVTnyCjU

Beautiful tool that makes it very easy to monitor multiple social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook Insights and Analytics can be integrated. In Hootsuite, you can find numerous standard reporting capabilities and, more importantly iPhone apps, iPhone, Blackberry and Android. There is a free version, but also a pro and enterprise versions with more features are available. Other packages are more or less comparable with CoTweet and TweetDeck , where in my opinion at CoTweet the price is too high. For a further comparison this article at The Content Factory. But other less familiar tool similar nature MarketMeSuite .

If you have a blog, you can use PostRank to rank your level of engagement and how your readers value your content. A daily report is send to your mailbox with the latest news and insights from real browser. They do well at Postrank: Google recently acquired this tool.

If you are an active Facebook-user you definitely need to check out this package. They offer as they call it, a Social CMS. A package that also delivers features with characteristics of a content management system, such as the scheduling of updates, user right management but also management responses to deal with wall post can be assigned to certain team members. Entirely specific to Facebook. In addition they also offer a free version of a paid version with more options. A 14 days trial is available so why not try it.

A relatively new tool with multiple features . You will understand how well your tweets in terms of distribution work out. And the best thing is that the tool is based on historical Booster Crowd effects of your tweets and behavior of your followers, indicating the best time to send your tweets and the ability to schedule them right away. More info in this interview with co-founder Ricky Yean by The Next Web.

As they themselves said at the launch last month, “a team collaboration, tools integration and task management system to bring your social media workflow write one central dashboard.” Check out the video and try it , especially when multiple colleagues are active in social media.

Last Wednesday Blog Level and the 2.0 version of Tweetlevel were launched. Edelman offers this tool for free and without further reigstration. Both tools allow you to find the most influential blogs and people on Twitter. The good thing is, that tweetlevel takes into account that much of the online discussion today, has moved from the comments at blogs to Twitter. The discussions on Twitter are included in the determination of the impact. Sounds nice… but  I think that in a discussion on Twitter, only in the first tweet the url of the blog is used, and when the discussion develops, people don’t use the url anymore.

You may wonder what the diffrence is between the tools described and the more basic tools. The sophistication lies especially in the extensive (re) capabilities, such as adding a piece of workflow management for certain online communications. The full integration of monitoring and engaging functionalities, integration with existing CRM-systems to make these tools more advanced tools, often with a higher price tag. In the report The 2011 Listening Platforms Landscape Forrester makes a distinction in Social dashboards, analytics providers and Multichannel Listening Service Partners.

In an earlier report The Forrester Wave™: Listening Platforms, Q3 2010 Forrester is comparing some of the suppliers next to each other: they compare the offerings and the strategy.

Radian6, Nielsen and Converseon are, according to Forrester’s report, the big leaders in the Social Media Listening Platforms. Radian6, marked by Forrester as a leader, published the report a while ago for limeted time online for free in pdf-format. Google is giving some interesting searchresults Otherwise, you can request the report at Converseon.

With the recent buying of Radian 6 by Salesforce there’s a company developing that integrates social media monitoring, CRM, lead management and web analytics in multiple channels whith recently some very interesting improvements on mobile.

Firehose access
The larger packages often have the advantage of using the streaming API, also known as the Twitterverse FIREHOSE. This allows them to use Twitter data almost real-time and with full access, unimpeded by the limits that normally apply for filtering. These limits result in a delay in the arrival of the tweets. Firehose access is generally still an advantage for the larger parties, even though Twitter granted a number of startups also FIREHOSE-access. Through services such as Gnip and Datasift as a kind of data service performance are becoming more parties full access to the data from twitter.

Automatic measurement sentiment
Many tools enable automated sentiment that they can measure. Frankly, I am not a believer here. The ambiguity of our language is even for normal human beings sometimes hard to interpret with (online) misunderstandings as a result. Furthermore, how do you value a tweet like “Useless customer service of company X, but very well helped by webcare their webcare department”. Neutral, because it is partly negative and partly positive? Or positive because that is the final situation determined? What if the tweet was “Was helped by webcare very well, but what a lousy customer service they have at company X”. Does the computer understand the correct chronological order? And that’s still only about one tweet. What if the case is made up of several tweets? To go short: ask, very precise, how the the sentiment is determined by a tool. Click through to read the content of individual expressions, the sentiment score and judge for yourself. Perhaps that the automatic scoring of sentiment might actually be helpful for you. Not by looking at the absolute values ​​but rather to changes over time.

Gatorade has Social Media Command Center, Dell has a Social Media Listening Command Center and KLM established a Social Media Hub. These are all companies that have a dedicated team taking a active rol in the social media arena, most of them on a 24/7 base.  They operate from a physical, centralized space in the office, that looks like a controlroom, see the video below:

Do you really need this to play an active role in social media? Forrester gave in their report “Best Practises for Social Media Intelligence Command Center a very handy guideline in which they took into account the amount of customers you have, the industry you work in and the popularity of your brand.

After you have answered these questions a score of 20 or above there is a clear need for a Social Media Center, according to Forrester. What if a central team with its own center, especially the organization does is aware of the importance of social media and powerful way to share the insights with relevant departments in your company. Gatorade put their center in the heart of the marketing department. Eventually you will get social media in the DNA of your organization and a center like this can make a nice boost as a facilitator. One remark! Don’t make a command center or the tools your primary goal.

I hope this article gave you some ideas of the possibilities for social media tools and help you to make the right choices. Realize, however, that the best tools can sometimes fail. The Nikon case above shows that you need stay focused and operate with 100 percent attention. Even the best tools are not always able to answer your question completely. In social media business, it’s not just about the tools, despite this lengthy article .

An almost complete list of all tools found in this wiki. Fee free to add tools and describe what you think is good or bad about the tools you use. And yes…. representatives of social media tools mentioned here can also leave a response!

With a big thanks to the people of Forrester for granting access to the visuals. Original post in Dutch can be found here at Marketingfacts.nl.

For some major brands, this is probably true. That’s why companies like Dell, Gatorade, Delta Airlines, Best Buy and many other global brands are re-organizing their service and communication department. Without this structural change, they wouldn’t be able to handle all the interactions with consumers.

However, for most brands, the number of tweets is rather limited. I recently did the test for a big Belgian company. And we discovered that over a time span of 12 months, they should have replied to about 2000 tweets, which means about 10 times a day. My guess is that this could take up to 15-30 minutes a day if somebody grabs this responsibility. I would assume that this is still within the possibilities of a big company, don’t you agree. Reality: the company spends hours of meetings talking about the fact that they don’t have enough resources to answer all the tweets. During all these wasted meeting hours they could probably have replied to thousands of requests from their audience.

For me, the main concern should NOT be: “we will have too many interactions and questions to deal with“. Most companies should worry about the fact that there are not enough people interacting with them. In fact, if a big company only needs to reply to 2000 tweets over a period of a year, than it sounds like the level of brand engagement and interaction is pretty low. The number of tweets tells you something about being top of mind, being interesting enough to be talked about.

My advice is:

• - Stop having meetings in which you say that you don’t have time to manage your brand on Twitter, just do it during that time.
• - Stop worrying about having too many tweets, but think about how you can increase the number of positive conversations about your brand.

You know what I observed? Well, you can know how advanced a company is in integrating social media by the facts they use to show off.

Most companies tell the world about their number of fans. Others talk about some brilliant campaign they ran. In most cases, this campaign invested a limited amount in paid media, but the earned media is booming. We’ve seen a few of those, haven’t we.

But if a company is really advanced in social media integration, they show off with something else. They tell the world how many employees have been fully trained in using social media. Last week during a conference in Canada, Dell told the world that they have more than 8000 fully trained people.

We all remember the ‘Dell Hell’ of 2005, where journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis vented about his frustrating dealings with Dell on his blog. This sparked a ‘blog storm’ as Dell consumers with similar frustrations linked to Jarvis’ blog, which eventually received widespread press coverage.

In a 2007 BusinessWeek article ‘Dell learns to listen’ Jarvis visits Dell and spends time with CEO Michael Dell to take stock of the company’s efforts in engaging with its consumers and the wider community. He opens the article with the statement that ‘[i]n the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first’.

The Social Brands 100 was compiled over a period of three months with the contribution of an external panel of social experts drawn from business, academia, media and communications, and Brandwatch, the social media analytics data provider.

• Download the Social Brands 100 report (3MB)
• Download the ranking (3MB)
• Download average sector score (3MB)
• Download by sector (3MB)

From event activation to issue advocacy, from product promotions to crisis management, the microblogging platform allows businesses many modes of customer communication that can be tailored to match their customers’ preferences.

Today I tried to get my mailing address changed at my drinking water utility company. Without a chance! Both their telephone helpdesk and the internet was not working ! While I spoke with a customer service officer on the phone he could not take note of my question. So I reached out to their Twitter account [http://twitter.com/WorldWaternet], only to find out that they use that account for promoting their corporate sustainability initiatives.

Truth is: not all companies who could be interacting on social media for customer experience do so yet. Amazon for example won’t use them to respond to customer queries. Our research showed that 11% of companies never reply to consumer service questions on Twitter.

Fortune took 8 companies to the test and compared their customer service efforts via Twitter, on the phone and via internet. Hyatt hotels,  Dell, Bank of America and Microsoft are amongst the tested companies.

It’s no secret that we at InSites Consulting are huge fans of Zappos, but in this Fortune test their customer support via @Zappos_Service was somewhat disappointing. The tweeted question was about changing a shipping address on a recently placed order. In a cheerful reply the question was “answered” by forwarding the number to Zappos’ customer service telephone line, asking that official customer service questions be directed through more traditional channels.

The other examples also show that in most cases the old-fashioned, often infuriating, customer service hotline was actually the fastest and most thorough means of solving a problem. The reality is that only the simplest questions can be answered in 140-character messages. And even then, you’re not guaranteed to get a response.