Last week, I worked with a number of fabulous folks from the Triangle AMA to put on a Social Media Boot Camp.  We had an amazing turnout with a talented lineup of speakers and a great group of eager participants.  My presentation focused on how to Protect Your Brand in the Conversation Age.  There was one section that I discussed that seemed to resonate with folks so I thought  I would go into more detail here.

One of the challenges when it comes to monitoring your company, products, people, brand and even yourself online is the incredible amount of information available.  I work with several clients that their company name alone is written or spoken about online more than 5,000 times a day.  Most companies don’t have the resources or the time to be able to go through all that noise.

One of the ways I get through all the clutter is to triage my mentions.  By triaging, I can quickly determine the discussions I need to spend more time and attention on and which ones I can kick to the curb immediately.  When I think of triage I always think of the old TV show MASH.  Remember that show with Alan Alda based in the Korean War?  When the helicopters and buses came in with wounded GI’s, they would go running out to meet them to determine which guys were hurt the worst.  The triage allowed the soldiers with the most serious injuries to go to the head of the line ahead of the less serious.

Social Media triage is the exact same thing.  We need to quickly look at what our monitoring has identified and determine what needs your time and attention and what does not.  There are a number of tools and technologies that say they can do this work for you.  To be honest, I have not found one that I am willing to make a financial investment in, so I have put together a rag-tag way to triage my online mentions without having to pay out any cash.  Here’s the Silverstein Social Media Triage process:

SearchStatus – My browser du jour is Firefox, if you happen to use Chrome, I am sure there are plugin’s like this one.  SearchStatus is a free Firefox plugin that embeds the Google Page Rank, Alexa ranking and Compete numbers right on the bottom of your browser.  Very quickly, I can go to a web page and get a good idea on what kind of visibility a specific webpage and website receives in Google as well as how much traffic it gets daily, weekly and monthly.

If you are not familiar with Google Page Rank, Google assigns every page within its index a ranking from 0-10.  This ranking determines how much visibility it receives in Google’s natural search results.  I think about the rankings this way:

• Page Rank 0-3 – MIA – Website/page is not competitive in Google
• Page Rank 4-6 – Visible – Competing on some of their keywords
• Page Rank 7-8 – Rock star – Top rankings and strong visibility
• Page Rank 9+ – Oprah – Owns it!

Please remember if you are on a blog page that just launched, the page might not have any page rank because it is too new.  My recommendation is to go to the blog’s home page and see what their page rank is there.

Next let’s look at our Compete numbers.  If you right click while your mouse hovers over the Compete graph, it will tell you the average monthly visitors the website receives.  If you would like, you can click over to compete.com and get more information.  Registration is required, but basic package is free.

In just a couple of minutes you can pull together the following information:

• What kind of visibility a webpage/website has within Google.
• How much traffic this website receives daily

With knowing these two items, you can make an informed decision on whether this mention deserves more of your time or not.  Though, I have one more item to add into your bag of tricks.  I believe one important characteristic of an “influencer” is he/she creates or develops conversations on their own website as well as on other websites.  I like to look at how many and what kind of comments does the original post have?  How active of a community does this website have? Are there other conversations taking place elsewhere that are linking back to this original post?

To see conversations on other websites linking back to one place, I like to use this cute little bookmarklet called Convotrack.  This is a tool that you add to your bookmarks toolbar and when on a web page, you click it and it shows you any and all conversations taking place on the web that are linking back to a specific page.

This quickly can show you how many folks are talking about the post and what kind of visibility is it receiving out on the interweb.

Everything that I just walked through should take you no more than a couple of minutes to complete once you have the tools setup.  Is this full proof?  Absolutely not.  All of these tools should not be taken as the gospel by any means.  I believe these tools and others like them will allow you to quickly triage your online monitoring to  help you spend more time on what is most important to you.

If you have your own tools or tips, please feel free to add them to comments below.

Have you seen the video of North Carolina Congressman Bob Etheridge getting in a physical confrontation with what looks to be a young student?  You can read all the details and see the video over at WRAL. I have also included the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wow, someone was having a bad day.  Rep. Etheridge cursing the invention of the video camera knew he had no choice and issued an apology.  WRAL has the whole story here and here is his apology:

“I have seen the video posted on several blogs.  I deeply and profoundly regret my reaction and I apologize to all involved.  Throughout my many years of service to the people of North Carolina, I have always tried to treat people from all viewpoints with respect. No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.  I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.” – Rep. Bob Etheridge (NC-02)

I am not writing this to call to arms all the trolls and hammer Etheridge for doing something dumb, I majored in dumb and continue to excel at it today.  I would like to discuss Etheridge’s apology statement that he released.  To the PR/Communications staffers in Rep. Etheridge’s office who wrote this, I have to ask one question.  What are you talking about???

“No matter how intrusive and partisan our politics can become, this does not justify a poor response.  I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.”

What does partisan politics and public discourse have ANYTHING to do with this event.  You weren’t having a debate on the House floor Representative.  You were walking down a public street and two “students” (Maybe?  Rumors are this might of been a setup) asked you whether you supported the President of the United States agenda.  Not only are we allowed to do this, our constitution empowers us to question our elected representatives.

Can’t we get to a place where we as marketers and communication professionals effectively communicate to our target markets without throwing in a whole lot of double-talk and BS?  I am far from a PR person, but I would like to try rewriting this apology.  You have seen Rep. Etheridge’s response, now here is how I would of wrote it:

“There is absolutely nothing I can say other than I am deeply sorry.  My actions were inexcusable and no-one has the right to lay their hands on another person.  I want to sincerely apologize to the young man in the video and I also want to apologize to my constituents who deserve to have someone in office that represents them much better than I did today.”

Which version do you like better and why?

I was recently attending a conference where I was scheduled to speak. I got to the conference about an hour or so early. (I am directionally challenged so I leave plenty of time for me to get lost once or twice.) Since I was so early I looked over the speaker list and saw there was a person speaking before me about online monitoring. If you are not familiar with this term, very simply put, a business or organization monitors what is being discussed online about their company, products, brand, etc. They track what kind of “conversations” are taking place online relevant to their business through text, audio and/or video. It’s something that my team and company have been doing a lot for our clients recently so I was interested to hear what this person had to say.

I watched in horror as this speaker proceeded to literally scare the living hell out of these attendants going through absolutely nightmarish scenarios of what could happen to their companies if they did not start monitoring these online conversations immediately. I was really wondering if this type of mortal death scenario really worked as a sales pitch for this speaker? And more importantly, I was wondering what was the worst thing that could happen to me if I stood up and smacked this guy in the back of the head with the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall behind him?

When this guy finally finished his 45 minute what I have aptly named “Holocaust” speech, he asked for questions and you know what, not one single person raised their hand. Why? Because this speaker who I have nicknamed Adolf did absolutely nothing for these people. These attendees paid money to come and hopefully learn something and all that Adolf did was scare them to death and overwhelm them on a subject they were already confused about in the first place.

What I have learned recently with a lot of the work we have done is that online monitoring and reputation management is absolutely important, but not for the reasons Adolf was proposing. The value online monitoring delivers is that companies have the ability to truly listen to both customers and perspective customers. They get to hear first hand what their target market is thinking, both good and bad. If they listen well enough, they can learn from this feedback and once they reach a point of comfortability, they can reach out and engage with these people; integrate themselves into the conversations.

Every company will have a crisis, but these are few and far between. Yes, when something bad happens or is said, you want to know about as quickly as possible so you can act accordingly. Though more often then not, what this type of engagement allows is for good and not for bad. It allows companies to reach out to new customers, continue communicating with existing ones and most importantly, turn a regular customer into a company evangelist because the company showed them they were willing to go the extra mile.

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