I’ve just got back from an amazing (and enlightening) trip to London where I was lucky enough to receive a sneak preview of the new features coming soon to Radian6 (just one of the social media monitoring tools we use) which will make the interface super powerful for organisations.

It made me realise just how significant the advantage will be for those companies who are listening to, and joining in this online conversation. And it isn’t just about marketing, it can and will sometimes involve customer service, HR, corporate affairs and legal and perhaps every other division of an organisation.

An article in today’s South Australian Business Journal by Cameron England highlights the urgency for organisations to do ‘get social’.

It quotes Andrea Matthews from GM Holden which is a great example of an organisation that  has done it the right way. The team, headed by Andrea, placed a huge emphasis on active listening and monitoring before engaging in this space.

We started with a relatively extensive period of listening and identifying where consumers, our customers and enthusiasts are participating on line so we could fit a strategy around that. Andrea Matthews, GM Holden

Organisations will all be on different points along the path of adoption of social media - but the one thing we at Carve believe every organisation should do is start listening today. Below are some some very good reasons why they should do this and here’s a link to the full document we’ve summarised from by Radian6.

Top 10 reasons to monitor your brand in social media

1. The compliment - equivalent of testimonials or references, they deserve your attention
2. The complaint - respond early, turn into a positive
3. The expressed need - monitor keywords related to your product or service area - it’s an opportunity to reach out
4. The competitor - realtime competitive intelligence
5. The crowd - knowing what issues your customers care about
6. The influencer - spread opinions on brands fast, their views rank high in Google - where your customers will see it
7. The ROI - easily track and measure the effectiveness of a campaign
8. The crisis - an early warning system
9. The audit - ’score’ a brand’s overall user sentiment, rank social media channels, competitive analysis, uncover brand advocates and potentially pinpoint most valuable / engaged audiences for ad placement
10. The thread - connect the dots between the often splintered social media conversations on Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc.

Sometimes I forget that a lot of tools we’re aware of aren’t necessarily known to everyone, so I will try and make a point of remembering to post them up here.

Case in point was in Prague yesterday when I did a quick ‘Twitter sentiment snapshot’ of Virgin Atlantic using http://twitrratr.com/ on the big screen. As I turned round I noticed that everyone was taking note of the URL, so, well here it is.  The grab below is a snapshot of sentiment around Brizzly, the Twitter tool of the moment we’re using @ Carve.

Twitrratr is pretty simplistic but a fun / instant / free way of checking out the view of the Twitterati. Give it a go

There are loads of useful tools to help you track buzz, your brand / product conversations, competitors, etc on Twitter. One that’s definitely worth playing with is Trendistic

Below (it looks terrible small on the page but you get the idea) is a static embed showing the buzz following Derren Browns prediction of the lottery here in the UK last week. Notice how there is a regular low level buzz for “lottery” throughout the time period but it peaks hugely with the Derren Brown spike as people discussed the event for the draw on Wednesday night ( and “how he did it” - the second spike accompanying the follow up show on the Friday. )

Love to hear your feedback and see your graphs (usethe comment below and embed function on Tredistic