I’m at the first ever Social Media Weekend 2011 at the Columbia University School of Journalism until tomorrow. It’s the perfect time to blast this info about LinkedIn out again since I just sat through a 90-minute session on job hunting and career management.

The information below was distributed to attendees of an event I organized for the Columbia Business School Club of New York this past winter. It includes links to videos, blogs, and posts about maximizing your LinkedIn profile for your professional development for job search and even lead generation.

Hello and thank you for your interest in the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York’s Your LinkedIn Profile: To make it to the top, make it POP Social Media Event held at the Samsung Experience on December 6, 2010.

Below are links to the video of the presentation as well as links to more info on maximizing the effectiveness of your LinkedIn profile and network from the advisor and other sources.

Whether you attended or not, if you watch the video, we would like to receive your feedback, so please fill out a 5-minute 7-question survey help us plan for new and even better social media related events.

Here is the link to the survey:  http://svy.mk/cbs120610

We trust and hope that you will fill it out. Please take a moment to fill it out. If you provide your contact information, we will select one survey respondent who will receive a personalized one-time evaluation, including providing suggestions, of their LinkedIn profile. However, we do not require personalized info to submit survey responses. You may enter a pseudonym, if you don’t want us to know who said what.

Here is the contact info for the presenter & advisors for the event:

Contact Information for the Presenter &the HANDS-ON SOCIAL MEDIA ADVISORY COUNCIL

Presenter: Ruben Quinones, Director of New Media, Path Interactive

rquinones@pathinteractive.com 646-881-4594

HANDS-ON SOCIAL MEDIA ADVISORY COUNCIL

Ben Bloom, Digital Strategist, Wunderman

benjaminbloom@gmail.com 646-942-8438   

Cecilia Pineda Feret, Digital Marketing Strategist, CBS MBA

LinkedIn Event Organizer

ceciliaferet@yahoo.com 917 202 8895

Brad Jobling, Social Media Manager, Columbia University Department of Surgery, CBS MBA

isbjobling95@gsb.columbia.edu.    201-723-8605.

Mo Krochmal, Journalist, Educator and Social Median

Mo.krochmal@gmail.com 917.514.0197

Catherine Ventura, Social Media Content Strategist, Venn Diagram

917-292-0519

Amy Vernon, Director of Viral Marketing Strategies, BlueGlass Interactive Inc.

avernon@blueglass.com

Christine B. Whittemore, Chief Simplifier, Simple Marketing Now, CBS MBA

CBWhittemore@SimpleMarketingNow.com 973-283-2424

ONCE AGAIN, THANK YOU TO:

SAMSUNG & MARY REILLY & MARCIA ROBBINS, Members of the Columbia Business School Club of New York

LINKS on LINKEDIN

Christine B. Whittemore,

Making Your LinkedIn Profile Pop: CBSAC/NY Social Media Event

Summary of the event

http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/2010/12/making-your-linkedin-profile-pop.html

and

http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/2010/11/linkedin-content-marketing-podcast.html

With Find and Convert’s Bernie Borges

Her 3-part LinkedIn series:

• http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/2010/07/talkfloor-social-media-marketing-series.html
• http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/2010/09/linkedin-advanced-on-talkfloor-social.html
• http://www.simplemarketingblog.com/2010/11/linkedin-business-successes-on.html

Amy Vernon

The Evolution of Business Social Networks: Beyond LinkedIn

December 16th, 2010 by Amy Vernon (See 6 more posts by Amy)

http://www.blueglass.com/blog/the-evolution-of-business-social-networks-beyond-linkedin/

Mo Krochmal

Leveraging LinkedIn

http://krochmal.tumblr.com/post/1717392292/leveraging-linkedin

Catherine Ventura,

Why LinkedIn Should Be Your First Social Stop

British Airways Blog Business Connect

http://businessconnect.ba.com/2010/12/20/news/face-to-face-blog/why-linkedin-should-be-your-first-social-stop/

Videos of Your LinkedIn Profile: To make it to the top, make it POP Presentation and Q & A

Presenter, Ruben Quinones

1)      http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11295657

Courtesy of Mo Krochmal. Thank you, Mo!

Presentation was streamed live and archived by Mo Krochmal using Ustream.TV and his MacBook Pro.

2)      http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13443194/123_0508.MOV

Presentation was recorded by Sanford Dickert using his Flip Video Camera.

Courtesy of Sanford Dickert. Thank you, Sanford!

Additional links to more info on using LinkedIn

Selected Posts from Mashable on LinkedIn and Online Networking

• 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Leverage LinkedIn’s New Features
• HOW TO: Reignite Your Business Network Online
• 5 Tips for Using LinkedIn to Find Star Employees
• 8 Tips for Managing a LinkedIn Group
• 5 Ways to Avoid Sabotaging Your Personal Brand Online
• 13 Essential Tips for Landing a Job on LinkedIn

Blogs with More Info on LinkedIn

1. LinkedIntelligence
2. Business + Technology
3. I’m on LinkedIn — Now What???
4. Integrated Alliances
5. LinkedIn Blog
6. LinkedIn for Dummies How-Tos
7. LinkedWorking
8. Mr. LinkedIn
9. Rock The World with LinkedIn
10. Social Media Is My Middle Name
11. The Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn
12. The LinkedIn Personal Trainer
13. The Networking Coach
14. The Virtual Handshake
15. WindMill Networking

HAVE ANY OTHER HELPFUL LINKS? POST THEM HERE AND I’LL ADD THEM IN THE UPDATES. Thanks!

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Looking at this infographic reminds me of what my partner used to say:

“You are always on that damned computer!” Sound familiar on either side of the conversation?

Maybe I should show him this.  The truth is, it’s just not a 9 to 5 job . . .and no, he still doesn’t get it.

Considering all the time I’ve spent reviewing and learning about analytics online and offline over the past few years, this graphic listing does not seem to represent the time nor effort invested by many managers these days, as the cry for ROI  becomes a roar.

I’ll be posting a lot on measuring, because in 2011, that’s what the boss/client wants to/should hear about.  Whether they realize it yet or not.

What has your experience been as a manager or working with one compared to what you see here in  any of the areas?

Do you find any of the info on this schedule graphic surprising?

Original Post and Infographic on SocialCast’s THE FUTURE OF WORK Blog:

http://blog.socialcast.com/e2sday-the-hectic-schedule-of-a-social-media-manager/

Related posts:

1. The Definitive Guide: Social Media Monitoring and Metrics MyCustomer.com just published another of my articles with Marshall Sponder....

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MyCustomer.com just published another of my articles with Marshall Sponder. This time it’s one of a three part series on Social Media Monitoring and Metrics. See below for the article or click on the title in the prior sentence to read it on the wonderful CRM, Marketing, and Customer Management focused site, MyCustomer.com.

Calculating . . .Measuring . . .Monitoring

By the way, do let me know if you have additional resources, tools, blogs, groups, etc. that I can update part 1 with. Some vendors have contacted us and asked us to add them to our list. We’ll check them out and then update the article soon.

Part 2 of the 3 part series will cover case studies of successful application of monitoring/metrics. Part 3 will include excerpts of interviews with key players on the monitoring/metrics scene.

Here’s the article:

SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING AND METRICS: The Definitive Introduction

Posted by Cecilia Pineda Feret and Marshall Sponder on Mon, 11/04/2011

In the first of a three-part series, Cecilia Pineda Feret andMarshall Sponder provide a comprehensive rundown of tools, challenges and advice.

Perhaps you have heard of the terms ‘social media monitoring’ and ’social media metrics’ or analytics as it is sometimes known. There are those who are still trying to figure out how social media fits into their company’s strategy and may think these terms are interchangeable.

If you fall into this category, fear not. Most of the world still thinks this way as well, as more and more companies are quickly realising the importance of implementing social media along with monitoring and metrics of activity on these platforms.

Why monitor or measure?

Why would anyone want to monitor or measure the activity that refers to their product or service or even concept? Is there too much noise to make any sense of what is said anyway?

When you monitor, you are keeping tabs on what is already out there as well as the results of your own or others’ activity. You are collecting the actual information that your research runs across in the form of words and images: tweets, blog posts, comments, photos, videos and audio podcasts.

When you measure you are counting, tracking, noticing patterns and trends within this information. In short, you analyse the results of what you have monitored in order to help you connect better with your customer. Your messaging, competitive analysis, community building, branding, product development, even through crowd sourcing, and countless other tactics you implement to run your business effectively all benefit from your monitoring and metrics, which serve as a source of ideas, an inspiration, and a guide.

Murray Newlands is an international social media marketing expert and co-founder of Influence People Ltd the Social Media Monitoring events company. In his recently released e-book, “The Social Media Marketing Book,”  Murray lists eight simple reasons why you should care about monitoring. See his e-book for more detail:

1. Understanding
2. Marketing campaigns
3. Market research
4. Product development
5. Competitor analysis
6. Brand popularity
7. Market sentiment
8. Engagement
9. Influence

10.  Return on investment

The definition of monitoring

As it pertains to social media, monitoring involves listening; listening to customers, potential customers, the competition’s customers, vendors, employees, anyone and anything that involves what you need to know about your business and how it works or should work. Monitoring is also a time intensive activity with can have significant overhead as the process requires human attention and intervention.

What exactly should we monitor?

Here are key areas of traditional enterprise research to monitor and measure:

• PR effectiveness: Influencers activity and coverage of you and your topics.
• Demand signals: Trends in new interests or products.
• Brand strength: Types of mentions you get.
• Product strengths & weaknesses: Specific feature comments, positive and negative.
• Competitive position: How do you compare to your competitors. Where are you now? Where do you want to be?

It’s difficult to entirely separate monitoring and measurement; for example, the dashboards generated for the monitoring list above are used in measurement dashboards such as those referenced at Semphonic.com. (Seehttp://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2010/08/social-media-dashboardingwith-dashboards.html for more details.)

You monitor whatever keywords are relevant to your area. For example, if your area is automobiles, what other words than the obvious would you search across the various platforms? Cars, automobiles, transportation, travel and so on. How about energy pricing? Would learning about how your customers view energy pricing be relevant to your design and marketing of your automobile or automobile related service?

If it would, then you travel down yet another road where you may want to examine alternative energy, the recession, travel-related cost saving methods and so on. The possibilities may seem unlimited, but you have the resources for a determined amount according to your budget, so you start with what you can measure.

You can monitor what certain target markets are saying about you or automobiles in general or in specific. Countless associations and organisation within those target markets exist whose communications are searchable. Is there a relevant fan club your Google research has uncovered? Why not monitor their Facebook page, their tweets on Twitter, and other sources of online contact with each other? Are these fans taking pictures of your product and posting to their Flickr account or another account?

The challenges of monitoring

As mentioned earlier in this article, monitoring involves more human effort, filtering, which needs to be set up, which of course entails time. It is often unstructured and continuously evolving. Obviously, the bigger the company or field, the more you are going to have to monitor.

The definition of measurement/metrics

Once you have a monitoring system set up, at a certain point you need to measure those results or you will go crazy collecting the information as it overflows your account, your inbox, and wherever else you have set up to receive reports.

You will be measuring instances of words and phrases mentioned, issues raised, comparisons of service or product, support or critique for a product or service or cause, levels of engagement or interaction with a brand, with others in a community or network, pass along rate (like when info goes viral).

The challenge of sentiment analysis as a metric

An area that is heavily debated is SENTIMENT ANALYSIS. Can we make a judgment on whether a person or community feels a certain way about a product or service based on words chosen? What happens when someone refers to a product SUCKING SUPREMELY and that product happens to be a vacuum cleaner? Are we to think of every single instance of an instance where a word can be taken another way, the wrong way or many ways and measured incorrectly? That is where the challenges lie.

In accounting we have numerous methods of assessing the value of goodwill. Now there’s a challenge, a challenge very similar to what we face in social media and measuring goals, objectives, and outcomes.

The challenge of customer engagement as a metric

If there is increasing engagement regarding a topic concerning your product or service, do we follow PT Barnum’s advice as long as they spell our name right? These days we need to be there before anything happens by listening and measuring and assessing the value of what we are listening to and then measuring because there is simply too much.

How do we know if what we are listening to is worth tracking? Many business people hear about Followers (Twitter) and Fans, or Likers if you prefer, (Facebook) and immediately focus on those numbers, increasing them and those related with them. However, in the end, is it really about those numbers? Or is it about the bottom line?

It’s about all of this and much, much more.

The challenges of measuring and monitoring social media

With social media it can’t be just about the bottom line, because too much is involved. Yes, the bottom line is what concerns investors, managers depending on bonuses, and money does make the world go round. But there are also intangibles to ‘measure’.

Therein is the heart of the challenge of metrics. You can only measure just so much. You can set up a dashboard, but you still need somebody to read it and digest it so they can apply the information.

To conclude part one of this three-part series on monitoring and measurement, we offer the wisdom of Gary Angel, the CTO and co-founder of the technical consultancy Semphonic.com, headquartered in the California Bay area.

Steps to accurate measurement

Typically measurement is a multi-step process. Gary says it best in his Semphonic Blog:

• Find a means to accurately measure (even if expensive and one-time) the uber-measure.
• Create measurement around a set of sub-indicators that might be either causal or indicative.
• Correlate the sub-indicators with the uber-measure.
• Use a factor analysis to reduce the sub-indicator set and to identify combinations that represent key causal factors.
• Track the relevant sub-indicators on an ongoing basis as your key performance indicators.

“In terms of social capital, uber-measures are things like brand awareness, brand value, customer satisfaction, consumer trust and loyalty. Sub-indicators are likely to be things like social mentions, brand searches, web site visits, online satisfaction scores, relationship events (like registration), etc.”

“You’ll likely find that accurate assessment of the uber-measures requires professional primary research. Measurement of sub-indicators is likely to come from a whole grab bag of systems including web analytics tools, social monitoring tools, competitive landscaping tools and search monitoring tools.”

Gary warns that it is rare that companies take the intermediate and crucial steps of collecting these two items together and then analyzing them to create a measurement framework that might work on a going forward basis.

“But when it comes to measuring social media, understanding that ROI isn’t necessarily the focus can dramatically change your approach to measurement and open up powerful measurement directions that don’t directly yield an ROI but do yield powerful indications of how successful your efforts really are.”

Remember that when you are setting up a social media monitoring tool your focus is on listening and responding. Filtering out noise comes later. Here you want to be as inclusive as possible and let the human reader do the filtering.

For reporting (measurement) nobody is reading the actual posts and filtering them, because they are being aggregated up into mentions and sentiment numbers, and if there is noise that you have let filter through, then that noise shows in the numbers.

When you setup a profile, you need to review your info to ensure that garbage or noise doesn’t increasingly creep into your data stream. Maintaining it never really stops. For pure listening and responding once you setup a profile, you rarely really need to tune it.

Excerpts taken from: http://semphonic.blogs.com/semangel/2010/08/social-media-dashboardingwith-dashboards.html

In many ways, the value of monitoring and measurement will depend on the correct setup of the listening platforms and the interoperability of various tools used to create reports and insights; Marshall Sponder deals with this subject in depth in his book Social Media Analytics, to be published by McGraw Hill on August 19th, 2011 (September 2011 in the UK). See http://bit.ly/gd35vz for more details.

For another excellent source of information about social media metrics check out the presentation by Ytzik Aranov, COO, Social2B made recently during Social Media Week in New York at: http://www.social2b.com/index.php/social-media-metrics-measurements-and-scalability/.

Here is a listing of services that you may use for monitoring or measuring. Many of the tools do both, however.

Listening/monitoring tools:

• Radian6 Enterprise Level
• Rowfeeder Freemium/Inexpensive
• Viral Heat Inexpensive
• Export.ly Freemium/Inexpensive
• Brandwatch Free Trial/Moderate
• Lithium Expensive
• Alterian Freemium/Expensive
• FameCount Free for now
• Infinigraph Deserves a look, however focuses on encouraging more content from the crowd provided content

Measuring tools

• Sysomos Enterprise Level Moderate
• Crimson Hexagon VERY expensive
• Clarabridge Expensive
• Brandtology VERY expensive
• SAS Social Media Analytics Expensive
• Attentio Expensive
• Synthesio Expensive
• Compete Freemium/Expensive
• Glide Intelligence Expensive
• Integrasco Expensive
• Collective Intellect Expensive

More resources on the topic of Measurement and Monitoring:

• IAB Internet Advertising Bureau
• Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization
• Web Analytics Association
• Certified Institute of Public Relations
• BARCELONA Principles

Various meetups such as:

• Semantic Web
• NY Tech
• NY DataStories

Blogs to subscribe to:

• MetricsMan
• Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik
• Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls
• WebMetricsGuru, Marshall Sponder
• WebStrategist, Jeremiah Owyang
• Attensity
• Jacob-Morgan

Part two of the three part series will provide more help on how to deal with monitoring and measurement by looking at case studies from leading social media analytics tool companies.

Cecilia Pineda Feret, a Digital Marketing Strategist, provides online and social media strategy, implementation, and training to individuals and organizations. As a connector of people, ideas, and technologies, she is always learning, and sharing, about the next new thing in emerging digital communications. Cecilia also co-produces NY Data Stories. Follow her on Twitter: @cecipf and Tumblr cecipf

Marshall Sponder is the founder of Webmetricsguru.com, an industry blog about Web Analytics, Social Media and Search Marketing. He also writes a monthly column forEntrepreneur.com on helping businesses to leverage online marketing technologies successfully in a challenging economy. Marshall maintains his own Analytics Consultancy, Now-Seo, working with small to large marketing agencies. He is also producing NY Data Stories , events offering networking and analysis of business metrics. Follow him on Twitter:@webmetricsguru

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Note: this article first appeared at MyCustomer.com on February 1st, 2010

Big Brother and Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring
Marshall Sponder with Cecilia Pineda Feret
MyCustomer.com

As a web and social media analyst I am predisposed toward any service that merges customer data with site analytics information and online conversations – which leads me to the following bold, as some say, prediction. At the Monitoring Social Media 09 conference last November, my presentation included the statement: “Google will enter the Social Media Monitoring space within the next 2 years.” (For more information see Slide 15 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring).

Google, the largely Orwellian company that claims to “Do No Evil,” takes web site traffic data and correlate it to news, search trends, purchasing activity, search activity and browsing activity throughout the entire web. As I will be discussing Social Media Monitoring as part of my one-day conference in London on March 31st, 2010 at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp, I have further developed my thoughts from last November.

Based on my own assessment by looking at the available platforms today, there are no Social Media Analytics vendors or Online Reputation Management Services capable of matching Google yet. I think Google’s entrance into this area would be mostly helpful to some of the current entrants, many of them could end up going out of business or being swallowed up by others. For a recently updated list of Social Media Monitoring Vendors see StephenDebruyn.com.

Data that could be used for Social Media Monitoring is collected from our search history, websites and web presence. Google collects 18 months of Web History (down from 24 months of a few years ago) and can view and search from the full text of the pages you, or anyone else who has ever logged into Google. Once it acquired DoubleClick, Google integrated DoubleClick’s browsing pattern tracking with Google’s web history tracking to have a full spectrum of access to our web experience at its fingertips, including what sites we ultimately visited after leaving Google’s site, and what products we purchased subsequently.

By logging into my own Google Dashboard, I can see all the information Google collects about me including the number of Google Analytics accounts I have access to, my Google Calendar data (so they know where I have been and where I’m going), my purchasing history via Google Checkout, if I use that for online purchases, all the people I know via my Google Contacts/Address Book plus the information in my Google Documents, the textual analytics around my Gmail correspondences, my Google Reader habits and what I liked and shared on it, whom I’m following on Google Reader and who follows me. In addition to information it collects about us via our Google Accounts and websites, Google Search now displays real time data from Twitter and Facebook highlighting relevant search results.

Google also knows my age, zipcode and activity (ClickStream) giving them a 360-degree visualization of me and anyone else like me who spends a lot time interacting with the world via the web. Magnify the data Google collects on me by the number of Google Accounts (unknown at this time) and you end up with an unparalleled collection of information – what John Battelle calls The Database of Intentions as he describes in his book, “The Search.”

In addition, Google’s real time information about us has been improving exponentially, especially for business activity. Google knows our location in physical space via Google Mobile (and our movements, where we were, are and where we went next), our advertising activity and our profit or costs on Google AdWords.

According to an analysis of 4 million websites done late last year by Factual, 28% of all websites are being monitored by Google Analytics. As of 2007, 108,810,358 websites existed — the way things are going, the number has probably more than doubled by 2010. Using 2007 numbers, Google Analytics was likely to track about 29 million websites then, and tracks probably closer to 60 million sites by now assuming the rate of growth has at least remained consistent. In all likelihood, it is much more than my conservative estimate.

Keeping in mind all the information Google collects on us, why shouldn’t it enter the Social Media Monitoring space with their own suite of solutions? After all, they already have entered many other areas where they are considered one of the top or THE top application for that area: Advertising, content, health, commerce, mobile phone, power monitoring, news, and web analytics tracking. It would be a natural fit for Google to enter Social Media Monitoring.

While Google has yet to formally compete with Comscore, Quantcast, and Nielsen in audience monitoring on web platforms, they can easily draw upon the categorization of services, create their own categorizations, and, to some extent, already have within Google Analytics Benchmarking and with Google AdWords. Any website owner can compare their own traffic with other websites in the same category – the data is anonymous, but highly indicative and useful.

What might a Google Social Media Monitoring platform look like and what features might it have?

• Free, easy to use, and accessible to anyone who has a Google Account.

• Any website monitored by Google Analytics would also be monitored for mentions against specific pages of the site, much as WebTrends reports referral logs to Radian6, but, in this case, it will be Google Search feeding Google Analytics seamlessly much as Yahoo! Search feeds Yahoo! Pipes.

• Google Alerts, which have already been built into Google Analytics, via its Intelligence features, could list any mention or event that surpasses a preset threshold. Google Analytics already does this for site events such as more page views, visits or time spent on a page than normal based on trending algorithms that Google has employed and maintains for each Google Analytics account.

• Google’s entry in Reputation Management could also take the form of a coordinated response to online mentions using a version of Gmail, with preset templates already set up for the site owner to respond to negative or positive buzz.

• Specific solutions might be offered using an advertising campaign with AdWords, including on YouTube where links would be provided in response to a specific action or mention, so that the site owner or business could take immediate follow-up action and have the information appear in Google’s properties counterbalancing or supporting mentions as the case may warrant. Google could or would charge the User for running advertising against the responses, but the User, for the most part, could or would use Google’s Reputation Monitoring service for free. Google could create and maintain a PR/Management Dashboard for individuals and entities.

• Reputation Management could also be added to Google via Google Webmaster Tools. Now a site owner can monitor how often their websites are crawled by Google, any problem encountered, and is able to use a response form to communicate directly with Google when there is a problem with their site. Google can find information on the web relating to each page of the site and place it in Webmaster tools for response by the owner while still passing the data to Google Analytics for analysis, trending and alerts.

• Paid Advertising via Google AdWords (or AdSense, if you’re a publisher) could be integrated with brand mentions in Social Media that appear in Google Search and tied to landing pages monitored by Google Analytics. ROI could be calculated, perhaps for the first time, for Social Media efforts across most or all of your marketing channels.

As Google has almost all the pieces in place to do a better job of social media monitoring than anyone else, why hasn’t it formally entered this space yet?

Simply put, until now, the Social Media Monitoring space wasn’t big or important enough for Google to get involved, it was still a niche market in its infancy, according to Forrester.

So far, much of the online marketing budget for Businesses has been focused on Search (Paid and Organic) and not Social Media. In addition, Google may be hesitating until the market grew big enough. Meanwhile it has been increasingly viewed as Big Brother; where Google’s entrance into monitoring is likely to amplify fears that Google knows everything about us and will use that information for its own best interests at own expense.

But, in 2009 the tide began to turn in favor of Google dipping its foot into Social Media Monitoring as conversations began to be viewed as markets with a whole class of technologies emerging to help companies keep track of the online conversations. Last October two key events happened which helps Google justify enter the Social Media Monitoring space.

o First, In-Q-Tell, the investment arm of the U.S. government that also serves the C.I.A bought a stake in Visible Technologies, one of the largest Social Media Monitoring vendors. This action sent a signal to Google and the business investment community that Social Media Monitoring was on the verge of becoming a big business (one that Google may want to be part of).

o Second, the FTC released its Blogger rules defining the scope and penalties around monitoring blogger payola and Social Media endorsements. As more and more businesses and individuals seek to monitor online reputation the market for Social Media Monitoring is becoming much more crowded with bigger profits for the main players such as Visible Technologies, Radian6, Buzzmetrics, et al.

I suspect Google has considered entering Social Media Monitoring for some time now and has been quietly working on its own offerings, poised to enter the market at any moment and dominate it, as Google has proven over and over. Often Google acquires companies to enter a space such as the recent purchase of AdMob to enter the Mobile Advertising space. The Google acquisition I am most familiar with is Google acquiring Urchin in 2005 and making it a free product to anyone who opened a Google Account. However, I do not believe Google needs to acquire a Social Media Monitoring Platform as their own products are at least as good as anything they could acquire and they have everything they need to launch their own solution and tie it to their existing products.

How would Google’s entry in the Social Media Monitoring be good for the existing players in this space?

• Google’s entry into any business area raises the visibility of that sector and further legitimizes the business model of that sector.

• Google’s entrance into Social Media Monitoring will force monitoring vendors to cooperate with each other and improve their offerings, just as Google’s entrance into Web Analytics encouraged vendors to differentiate themselves from Google Analytics, focusing on features such as event correlation, segmentation and rich media tracking, features Google Analytics did not initially offer, but does now.

• Development of standards for Social Media Measurement. As I mentioned in slide 11 of my presentation on the Future of Social Media Monitoring Social Media does not have a standard set of definitions for measurement of conversations, sentiment, or share of voice to guide vendors in implementation, which hampers interoperability of social monitoring platforms with each other, even though they are monitoring the same conversations online. Furthermore, implementing standards leads to more profit for vendors. One example is the IAB’s VAST Video Advertising Standard which further monetized third party Video Ad Platforms such as BrightRoll.

• Most vendors prefer not to share information with each other, however, with Google’s presence in this space, they will have more reason to do so.

These are just some of the reasons for Google to formally enter the Social Media Monitoring space. Of course, the usual suspicions regarding Google’s intentions as they enter any business are likely to surface again. Accusations of being BIG BROTHER hasn’t stopped Google before, and it probably won’t stop them now.

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I just read an article in AdAge written by Freddie Laker, Director of Digital Strategy at Sapient. He describes a situation that taunts the most impulsive among us. Those who cannot bear to let an uninformed writer and simply wrong piece of information float around out there in the nethersphere of cyberspace need to: STOP. REFLECT. PONDER.

As Freddie, (I can call you Freddie, can’t I? We’re both in this together here.) points out, sometimes drawing attention to a naysayer plays right into their original intention: drawing even more attention to their comments. His conclusion, in this case, ignore the tweet where a clueless reporter unaware of the role Sapient has played in the development of interactive marketing calls them “complete clowns.”

I can’t think of, immediately anyway, an industry where this kind of situation arises more frequently than in hospitality.

You sleep, you know how a hotel should be run. You eat, so you have every right to dictate how a restaurant should be run, how a dish should be cooked, served. Most people agree on that premise, or else we wouldn’t be witnesses to the success that is and has been Zagat‘s and CitySearch and Yelp.

That said, yes, as a guest you have a right to your opinion and are free to post it wherever you can find nowadays, whether it’s Yelp or an up-and-coming I need to add to the list, BooRah.

The problem develops when someone who is talking out of their hat has a clever or funny or distinctly credible way of phrasing things. Then that business’ reputation is at risk from a negative review that may have gone viral, if only in the sense that it influenced subsequent reviewers pushing them to be undeservedly panned to such a degree.

It’s happened to me, in fact, and I am an owner of a restaurant and a consultant to other ones, so I should know better. Sigh.

So, oh wizened readers and writers of AdAge and of Splash, Then Ripples, when then? When do we step in? What are our options to stem the flood of negative comments to our profiles and reputations when in an industry where people naturally turn to community reviews by their fellow guests?

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Augie Ray wrote this very NEED TO READ post, on reasons why someone would unfollow me which I read on Social Media Today on etiquette/manners/rules on Twitter. I was very happy to read the following . . .

I hate to call anyone out, but I follow Chris Brogan and find his Tweets incredibly noisy because of all his personal @replies. This morning he’s sent tweets like “@pilarstella – thanks. So far, no rappelling. ; )” and “@qzcolszh1949 – complete coincidence, but hey, I’ll take it. : ).” What are these supposed to mean to me (or others) other than @qzcolszh1949 and @pilarstella? I find Chris an interesting thought leader, but I may unfollow him because he’s getting in the way of me tracking interesting tweets from other less noisy thought leaders!

My goodness, I thought I was one of the few to disagree with how a Social Media Expert is Tweeting, and maybe I am, but for someone like Chris Brogan to keep @replying to people without even hinting at context? PUH-lease, stop it already. Someone else in the comments section of Social Media Today defended him saying that maybe he didn’t follow those he was @replying and COULDN’T DM them.

Um, I bet you a Haagen-Daaz Cookie Dough Ice Cream Bar that he DOES follow them back, but this is his way of trying to show that he “engages with his followers” and that he is able to make his platform interactive. Me? I find it annoying and I DON’T want to have to click AGAIN to find out why he’s saying what he’s saying that is so cryptically intriguing.

It’s not just Augie and me, is it? Not to call poor CB out on this, but maybe it’s time people stopped ragging on Robert Scoble and his unfollowing adventures and give honest and constructive feedback to someone who needs to hear it.

Actually, to address that Scobleizer item for a moment, I think less people would have been annoyed if Robert hadn’t made such a big deal about unfollowing the too many people on his list. Then again, maybe he mentioned it once and it got the ball rolling and rolling . . .and rolling. Leading to namecalling and so on. Personally, I think Robert had the right idea, and enjoyed all the attention just a smidge, just perhaps on a communications level, his was NOT the right integrated approach.

These days, because of a recalcitrant BlackBerry, the way I follow certain thought leaders and friends out of almost 2000 is sending them to my phone as texts. It’s a lot of messages, but those I find most interesting and worth saving I send to my email to read later and deal with on a bigger screen than my phone. So far that is working for me. And I edit the ones that go to my phone periodically and swap them out for different ones.

I do have groups on TweetDeck, but find that I look at that less because I am often in waiting mode where I can just swoop through Text Messages. I find with favoriting on Twitter I don’t tend to go back, so I prefer to save interesting URLs through Google Bookmarks now which I can categorize. Note to self, ask Twitter to permit categorizing of favorites.

As for my way of tweeting, re#2 I DO thank publicly for RTs & Follow Friday mentions, etc., but not consistently. Sometimes I DM it. Still on the fence about that one.

I totally agree with Augie on the rest of the 8 items on his list. . . lest you anger the Twitter Gods, or, at the very least, your followers.

How about you, are you annoying anyone on Twitter?

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It’s highly amusing, and also incredibly frustrating, to hear accomplished business professionals claim that they simply DO NOT HAVE TIME for social media. Do they REALLY need it, they ask? They haven’t needed it before!

They are MUCH too busy to devote time to a communications vehicle that is, as far as they are concerned, an unproven method within the business arena, particularly where their industry is concerned . . .whether it is architecture, jewelry making, or even the latest unbeliever, a SOFTWARE COMPANY! I know! Crazy, right? They think, “Ok, if I try this, my sales are supposed to EXPLODE! Or at least that’s what you are telling me, RIGHT???. . .” Ummmm, nooooo . . .