Freebie Twitter Listening Tools

Gotta love freebies. Yesterday, I started off my first day at the Consumer Electronics Show by attending a free session called “The Twitter Revolution: How The Real-Time Web is Changing the CE Landscape.” Steve Broback, founder of a social media agency called the Parnassus Group, was one of the speakers and shared some of his favorite freebie Twitter tools during the session. Here’s a recap of his recommendations:

search.twitter.com

This is square one. If you’ve never tried any listening tools, start with Twitter Search. Twitter Search can help reveal the current topics around your product, brand, industry, competitors, etc. It can also give you an initial look into consumer sentiment. Dave Taylor, who was another speaker on the panel, suggested combinations of queries that included, “I hate” or “I love”. There’s wealth of consumer research just at your finger tips with the humble Twitter Search.

TweetBeep.com

This is the Google Alerts of Twitter. TweetBeep allows you to get email alerts of keyword mentions on Twitter, every hour. TweetBeep also offers a premium version which allows you to get alerts every 15 minutes.

Trendistic.com

Trending Topics on Twitter.com are the top ten most mentioned words/phrases on Twitter in real-time. Trendistic is cool because it provides more information on the current Trending Topics, and it also allows you to search terms and view trend graphs for those terms, up to 180 days if you register.

PeopleBrowsr.com

This is a new one to me. It appears to be a Twitter management tool, like Hootsuite and Seesmic and Tweetdeck, but on a whole new level. I’ll have to play with this for a bit before I can really say much about it- but on the surface is looks very robust. If you’re a PeopleBrowsr user, leave a comment and tell me what you think.

Cloud.li

Broback called this “the cool Twitter tool that nobody knows about.” It’s a simple website that will create Twitter word clouds around your search terms, and will allow you to click on those terms to dive deeper. This is a good site for discovery.

BackTweets.com

All of the tools mentioned so far, Broback explained, have something in common. They are based on keywords. This last Twitter tool is different. BackTweets will allow you to enter in a web address and find Tweets that link to that address. This is really cool. It will show you the most recent tweets that have tweeted a given URL, and it even counts the short links like bit.ly and tinyurl.

Hope some of these can be useful to you. There’s so much you can learn about your customers by just spending a little time online and digging through Twitter. Happy hunting, I’m off to another great day at CES!

“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”

That was a statement made by Jeffrey Michael, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. Michael’s family runs Horizon Group Management LLC, which has filed a $50,000 lawsuit against a former tenant who tweeted a complaint about mold in her apartment. The company is seeking damages for libel, as they claim Amanda Bonnen has “maliciously and wrongfully published the false and defamatory Tweet.”  Libel, in less than a 140 characters.

Amanda Bonnen’s Twitter account has been since been deactivated, but reporters say that when active she only had 17-20 followers, and the tweet was posted in an @Reply, which means potentially not all of her followers would have seen the tweet. Here’s the $50,000 tweet if you’re wondering:  ”Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

Talk about killing a fly with a bazooka.  Just exactly what is Horizon Group Management trying to achieve with this lawsuit? Obviously the Horizon marketing staff is playing with a few cards short of a full deck. There’s nothing the firm could have done to ensure that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people will now read Amanda Bonnen’s comment. Below is a list of news sites and bloggers bringing light to the situation. I believe it’s only time before fan groups spring up all across social media in support of Amanda Bonnen.

In effect, Horizon Group Management has just created it’s own national social media crisis. They are their own worst enemy- there’s no way a casual tweep like Ms. Bonnen could have caused more damage to their image than their own lawsuit against her. This is going down in my book as one of the biggest social media follies of all time. #epicfail.

After I first heard about the story from a friend on Facebook, I knew I would have to write this blog post and add my voice to the public uproar against Horizon. With a lawsuit like this, you’re not attacking just one Twitter user, you’re making an attack on all of us. Companies and their products and services get bashed all the time on Twitter, a public forum for ranting is part of the draw. Smart companies learn how to effectively deal with complaints in social media. Others file lawsuits. Hopefully this one gets thrown out. Even if Horizon wins the $50,000, the cost of this bad publicity is indeed far more expensive. I hope they burn.

Get More

Horizon Group Management LLC v. Amanda Bonnen (actual lawsuit in PDF)

Huffington Post: Amanda Bonnen, Apartment Renter, Sued For ‘Defamatory’ Twitter Post About Mold

Chicago Sun-Times: Tweet about apartment mold draws lawsuit

Chicago Tribune: Angry company drops a wee tweet into media echo chamber

Windy Citizen: Tenant sued by landlord for tweeting about apartment

CBS Chicago: Uptown Resident Sued For Twitter Post

Chicago Breaking News Center: Landlord claims libel over ‘mold’ Tweet

Chicago Bar-Tender: Will one Chicago woman’s Tweet cost her $50,000?

Are you afraid of what your customers will say?

Majority of the social media consultation work I do right now involves companies and organizations that are social media virgins. They know it’s important to be involved with social media, and they hear a lot of buzz about it. But they don’t really understand how to get started. Too often, fear overcomes them and they back away.

Case in point: A friend of mine earned new marketing responsibilities this week and created a Facebook page for her company. It survived about half a day before management asked her to take it down, reportedly because they were afraid of negative comments.

Creating a Facebook page is a marketing tactic, not a strategy, and any such tactics should be borne out of a well thought-out social marketing plan that starts with a listening strategy. Aside from that point, it kills me that business management would put a halt to the Facebook page purely because they were afraid of what consumers may say about the company.

It’s a common concern, for sure. I hear it all the time. It’s probably because in the advertising world, we’re used to having full control of our marketing communications. Print ads, TV commercials, billboards, collateral, online banners… all are meticulously constructed, every color and every punctuation scrutinized to achieve the most effective ad creative to unleash into our markets. We slave over the details, agonizing over the size of the logo and the font of the copy and the tone of the piece. Then we make decisions about what distribution channels to use, the timing and the frequency of the ad, the media that is bought and the audiences we try to reach. Marketers cannot control all the variables in the advertising equation, but we can sure try.

That’s why social media is so scary to a lot of organizations. We have to give up some control. In traditional advertising, we control the message and we control the distribution. In social marketing, consumers can vocalize their response to our message, and they ultimately control the distribution. This is why it’s important not to bombard social networks with ads and marketing messages, but to say something of value, something that your consumers want to hear and would want to pass along.

Negative comments about your brand or product should not be censored or stifled, for two very important reasons:

1. Censorship will backfire on the web. Your consumers will call you out, tell their friends, and you’ll ultimately lose all authenticity and trust. 
2. Negative comments can be used as an objective means to evaluate your product and services. Smart marketers see a bad customer experience as an opportunity. Making it right with your customers can often lead to more loyal customers than you’ll ever earn from advertising.

If you’re stuck with your social marketing strategy, please leave a comment and tell me about it.