Online Marketing Trends

Talk about a broad subject.

What we can say for sure is that online marketing trends keep changing a new technology develops and matures and rather than rehash some of the older methodologies used, we though we would explore some of the latest things we have been getting our hands dirty with.

You may or may not have heard about to the term “Buzz Measurement” or “Buzz Tracking”. In this post we would like to take a closer look at why it is important to know who is saying what about your brand on twitter, facey or any other social network.

So now that you’re finally using all of the social marketing tools to get your brand out there, how do you know that the message you’re sending or the message that is being perceived is actually being heard?

This social marketing thing we all do creates lots of chatter and in doing this opens up the doors for all past, present and future customers to comment (not to mention competitors). So with this in mind it may be a good idea to start looking at the measurement tools needed to track and monitor the masses as they rave about your company or beat you down.

Let me give you an example – we were looking into helping an airline carrier monitor some of the social aspects to a new service they were considering. In this evaluation we were able to track and monitor in real time posts and comments to outlets such as twitter re their services. One situation was when the air steward announced that there was no smoking in the terminal or on the tarmac and that it was a disgusting habit. Now I’m not a smoker, but you can bet the people on board that are smokers took offence at being labelled with the words “disgusting”.

So much so that one of these people actually blasted the airline on their twitter account the minute they had net access via their phone – this person had over 5,000 people following them and as a result this was re tweeted and so on ….

Obviously this was just the stewards opinion and not something the airline writes into it’s hand book – however when you upset a large demographic like this – all context can go out the window and damage is suffered.

Our advice to the airline when we saw this erupt live was a recommendation that there should be a memo that goes out immediately to all staff that they will need to be careful not to single out any one group providing this instance as a sample.

Now remember – it’s not all about looking at the negative.  It can also be useful when evaluating the marketplace for your existing or new competition, or even to capitlaise on positive posts. Try creating  your own blog page around these positive posts that will be picked up in the search engines easily or other social bookmarking utility.

So – what tools do we like to recommend …

http://tweetvolume.com/

http://hootsuite.com/

http://www.socialmention.com/

http://www.google.com/alerts

There are many  others out there on the market, some free, some not – and others that will need more time to learn the way they work – however if you are serious about promoting your brand (who isn’t) and can afford to spend a few extra hours a week to monitoring the chatter – then buzz monitoring is essential.